


Apotheosis I

by OneMoreAltmer



Series: Oblivion: Taviverse [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Genre: F/M, Oral Sex, Spanking, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:14:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 43,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneMoreAltmer/pseuds/OneMoreAltmer
Summary: When Tavi wakes up in a jail cell in Imperial City, she has no idea of her own history, let alone what she's in for.  But she is a tool of the gods, and every step she takes moves her deeper into a quagmire of violence, horror, love, loss, and musings on the nature of the soul. Part one of two."That by which we fall is that by which we rise." - Tantric saying





	1. Prelude

I shouldn’t be here.  I am not the woman I was when Ocato promised me this armor.  She has turned to stone like the dragon.  I felt her leaving me as I stood there, dying as I stared up at him, as Ocato yammered about titles and rewards and glory and the Empire saved.  Hardly a word about what it had cost.

Too much.  More than the Empire was worth.

Grief and shame and anger haunt my steps through the Imperial City.  I will not go to see him, just as I have not gone to Cloud Ruler Temple again.  Even coming to receive my “reward” is bitter enough:  I am in danger of crumbling to pieces right out in the street, of screaming in pain every time some well-meaning shopkeep mentions how fortunate I was to know him.  I reach for my balm of choice.

I suppose I could have simply become a skooma addict:  I would hardly have been the first veteran to do so.  I could have sought out the madness of Sheogorath, but there was the risk that he would only drive the pain even deeper.  And either of those ways would have been visible on the surface, destroying the precious illusion of the Champion, the glorious Arch-Mage.  My choice is both more complete and more subtle.

I reach inward toward the icy shadow of Sithis.  His merciful cold sweeps through my chest –  blessed numbness.  He reminds me that love and salvation were both illusions:  only pain and death are real, and by embracing and serving death I have conquered pain.

Imagine what Jauffre would have said, if he knew.  The thought of his mortified glare almost makes me giggle.  I don’t remember the last time I laughed out loud.

But the thought of Jauffre also calls another thought to mind, briefly – what _he_ would have thought, to see me this way.  In some small space where the chill has not yet penetrated, I imagine I can hear his voice, sorrowful and pleading.  _Tavi.  It is not too late for you._

A hallucination I blame on proximity to the site of my bereavement.  And in any case, an obvious lie.  It is much too late.  It was too late when the old Emperor died in my arms, when Baurus sent me to Jauffre, and Jauffre to the priest with sad eyes and a haunting voice.

To Martin.  Sithis help me.  To Martin.


	2. The Collector

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi begins her career as a relic hunter, and sees both the best and the worst sides of Claude Maric. (sex chapter)

Not that I went on that first errand with the Amulet of Kings right away.  When I finally emerged from the sewer system beneath the city into the sunlight, I couldn’t think of anything but how beautiful the world was.

Actually, I didn’t remember anything about my life before that ill-starred morning.  I’d woken from some forgotten dream into a prison cell, some fool Dunmer chattering at me from across the hall – and the Emperor approaching, to flee some danger through the secret passage that happened to adjoin my cell.  He took a liking to me, saw something in me then that he did not have time to say…and then there were the men in red cloaks and masks, brandishing weapons and shrieking the name of Dagon.  How many times I would have to hear that cursed name in the coming months!

And then he was dead, leaving me with a strange necklace and the charge to find his son.  The last of the guards told me to leave through the sewers and head for Chorrol, where the head of his Order lived.  I suppose he thought I would know where that was.

But none of it mattered any more when I saw the sun and the lake.  It was all just the last part of the bad dream I’d been having, and now it all melted away.  Cults and assassins and heirs to the throne – what would such things have to do with me, anyway?  My only ambition was to wander those beautiful rolling hills, gathering herbs.  I fancied myself an alchemist, then.  I imagined myself as having an impact on the world about equal to that of a redwort flower.

And how did I know what the impact of a redwort flower should be, I who remembered nothing about myself?  These little things we don’t think of until it’s too late.

But even my half-formed vision of life as a flower-picking vagabond faded at the sight of the majestic ruin across the water.  _Vilverin._   I had no memory of anyone ever speaking my name, and yet I knew the name of this ruin.  There, do you see how it is?  How the webs are laid out before us from the beginning?  But I thought nothing of it at the time.  I felt the stirring of ancient knowledge, and took it for my birthright as an Altmer.  Of course I recognized it as Ayleid.  That was only proper.  Of course I went inside to look.

That tale you will know.  It is in every silly little book they have written about me, in one form or another.  There were bandits there, and a necromancer.  From the very first, fighting necromancers for my life.  Every thread is carried.  At any rate, you will also know that among the treasures I found there was a statue, one of the Ancestors.  I sold it at the Mystic Emporium along with everything else.  I always felt the most welcomed and comfortable with Calindil, with one of my own.  That will sound intolerant of me, I know, but it is true.  Don’t imagine that I am blind to the faults of fellow Altmer, however.  As a race we still remember when we were masters and men were slaves, and our cultivated politeness is only what we feel is the proper carriage of lords in exile.  We are an arrogant people.

I had not been in the city long when an old man approached me in the street, announcing himself as the servant of an even older mer who wanted to meet with me.  And _he_ , of course, was Umbacano.  I imagine that he is remembered by his neighbors as merely a harmless eccentric with a taste for Ayleid artifacts and the money to own many of them.  Certainly that was the guise in which he appeared to me on that first visit, as he sat there at his desk, his hair swirled up in that ridiculous manner that remains popular among the older Altmer for reasons quite unclear to me, and offered me twice what I had been paid for the first Ancestor for any others I could find.

“I must say,” he grinned in a grandfatherly manner, “I am surprised and particularly gratified to be able to trust in one of our own youth, even as it saddens me that you had not been taught about the Ancestors before meeting me.  This is our own heritage, our own history.  I hope that you will take this opportunity to steep yourself in it.  I envy you the exploration of the old cities.”

His offer was quite enticing to a young woman with no other source of income, so I set off directly for other ruins, as there were many near the Imperial City.  The next to yield a statue to me was little Culotte; then came Moranda, my favorite for no other reason than the name.  By then I was growing accustomed to ruins, and this one welcomed me in, beckoned me eagerly like a prodigal daughter.

I brought Moranda’s Ancestor back to Umbacano, and he shone with excitement.  He announced me “proven” and brought out a little sketch. 

“That is the High Fane,” I said, without thought. 

“Yes,” he said, and frowned for a moment, scanning my face.  “Yes, it is the High Fane.  There should be a carving there that will be an important addition to my collection.”  He gave me a key, and did not say how he had come into possession of that.

As I stepped out the door into Talos Plaza, contemplating the High Fane – I thought I had a guess where it was, for no good reason – I was intercepted by a man perhaps in his thirties, with chestnut hair streaked with premature gray, and laughing eyes.  He raised his eyebrows as if surprised by me.  “You are working for Umbacano.”  He had the polished accent of a Breton, and I liked that kind of voice, as I liked so many things above my station or means.  Altmer arrogance, you see.

So of course I pretended not to like it at all.  That was my idea of flirtation.  “Perhaps.  But as I do not remember seeing you in the household, I’m not sure why that is any of your concern.”

He laughed.  “I also work for him, but not in his household staff.  In fact I am a treasure hunter, not unlike yourself.  Will you join me at the Tiber Septim for a drink?”

I had no reason at the time to be leery of other treasure hunters, but I was eager to be away.  “I was planning to leave while I had some daylight left.”

“I won’t keep you long.  What I have to say may be of some use to you.”  His eyes sparkled with some hidden delight, and he gestured toward the inn across the square with one long, tapered hand.

There was no harm in having a drink.  The ruin wasn’t going anywhere without me.

He offered to walk with my hand on his, a gentleman leading a lady.  I laughed.  Even with my racial arrogance I had at least some sense of proportion.  I had crawled up into this city from a sewer:  I was no lady.  He shrugged and walked behind me instead.

He bought wine for us both as I took a seat.  He sat across from me, took a long swig of his drink, and studied me.

“So he made _you_ his new acquirer of Ayleid items.  What, does he imagine that it’s in the blood?  That you Altmer can sniff out your own like hounds?”

So he was arrogant, too.  I found that oddly charming.  “Are you sure that was the first impression you wanted to leave on me, or would you like to try again?”

“No offense,” he said quickly, covering the retreat with another quick drink.  “Obviously you’re competent enough.  But I know you haven’t been in this game long, because none of us have heard of you.  Umbacano has access to the best.”

“And you wonder why he settles for the likes of me.”  I sipped a little of my own wine, taking the moment to let him imagine me insulted.  “Honestly, I don’t know.  I imagine it’s because I found the first Ancestor.  Because I’m one of his kind.  Perhaps he trusts in my luck, or he thinks that I find them by some secret knowledge the rest of you do not possess.”

“Or you are young and reckless enough to charge into Ayleid ruins, because you haven’t yet run into the trap that will maim or kill you.  This is a dangerous profession – you know,” he grinned, “suddenly I feel quite rude.  I have never told you my name or asked for yours.  Claude Maric.”

“Tavi.”

“Short for an Altmer name.”

“It’s a nickname.  I don’t bother people with the whole thing as a rule.”  Funny that I should have implied a _rule:_   I don’t remember more than half a dozen people having asked my name before that moment.  But names were precious commodities.

“Ah.  Tavi, then.”  He leaned forward over the little table between us.  “As I was saying, it is a dangerous profession.  Am I correct in guessing that he has now asked you to go looking for the High Fane?”  Surprised, I nodded, and he nodded back.  “Then you should know that you are not the first he has hired for that task.  I researched it for him, figured out that it was a name for Malada, and refused the job.”

I quickly noted the alternative name in my head.  “Why did you refuse?”

“Yes, ask yourself that!  It’s because I can’t spend my finder’s fee if I’m dead.  The place is one enormous trap, Tavi.  If you like all your limbs in their current arrangement, you’ll refuse the job too, and go back to collecting Ancestors.”

I sized him up as I finished my drink.  He was a well-proportioned man of adequate grace, presumably enough skill in a fight to get out of any average sort of trouble.  He did not have the whiff of magic about him – I had learned to recognize that.  Without that talent, he had no way of guessing how many dangers I had already bested with quiet feet, a lockpick, and a well-timed fireball.  He probably imagined me just a thief with some mediocre weapon skill for self-defense, the same thing I imagined him to be.

“So that means you know where Malada is?” I asked.

“It’s out in the Valus mountains.  You’re not really listening to me, are you?”

“I can’t afford to turn the job down, Claude.  But I do appreciate the warning.”  I touched his hand lightly and started to rise to my feet.

He grabbed hold of the hand I had given him to keep me at the table.  “You should at least stay until morning.”

I arched my brows.  “Should I?”

“Night’s falling.  The roads are more dangerous at night.  And anyway,” he said with a wicked grin, “if you insist on going, this could be your last night in the Imperial City.  You should make it a good one.”

“Really.  And what should I do to make it a good night?”

His eyes flickered down the length of my body and back up again, gone more intense than his smile, which was still casual.  “I might have ideas.  Perhaps I have a weakness for redhead Altmer.”

“I imagine you seldom have the chance to indulge it.  We’re both rare and notoriously unfriendly.”  I was grinning. 

He laughed.  “Stay and have another drink.”

“Are you paying?”

“Of course.”

He paid for the next round of drinks, and for the room.  Board at an inn named for an Emperor is not cheap.

“He must pay you better,” I chuckled under my breath as we climbed the stairs.

“That, or he’s not my only employer.”  He unlocked and opened the door.  “After you.”

Perhaps it seems strange that an Altmer girl should have behaved so loosely, and with a human man at that.  And yet, that elven blood the Bretons claim had to come from somewhere, did it not?  I was breaking no vows, could not be held responsible for knowing his; and as for conventional Altmer mores, well.  I have already implied that my feelings toward my own kind are…complex.

It was a prettier room than I was accustomed to, and larger – almost a suite.  The sheets looked clean and soft on the bed, and by the door there was a table laid out with plates and even a few morsels of food.

I was pinned to the wall almost before the door clicked shut.  I tasted the wine on his breath as he kissed me.  He ran his fingers up through my hair and used it to yank my head back as his mouth ran down the length of my throat.  I brought a hand up behind his neck to hold him there, where he bit and sucked at the side of my neck while his free hand pulled at the lacings of my shirt.  Little point to that, since they didn’t go all the way down.  I pushed him away for a moment and pulled the shirt over my head, throwing it into the corner.  He gave me an appreciative grin, peeled off his own shirt to show more of his tanned, wiry frame, and returned to me.

Claude’s hands were browned by years of travel and adventure, and cupped in them the golden tinge of the skin on my breasts seemed pale.  He pulled me toward him by the nipples, and I started to squeal in protest, but his mouth covered mine again, probing now with his tongue.  He kept pulling and pinching, and I melted into that rhythm, danced my fingertips across his shoulders.  He let go at last, keeping me pinned in place with kisses, and his fingers snaked down to unfasten my pants.  (I usually wore pants in those days.  It was not the fashion, but it was much more practical.)  He opened them quickly – a thief, of course, with hands well-practiced in gaining him entry to hidden places – and turned one palm toward me, insinuated that hand between me and the fabric, stroked downward to part those lips with one long, thin finger.  I gasped, tightened my grip on his shoulders.

Now he was moving slowly, so slowly, a few long, perversely slow strokes:  and then the finger penetrated me, and then hooked and pulled forward, moving inside me at the same time his palm pressed up close.  I started growling, clawing at his back, frantic with need.

He glanced sideways for a second, then moved his hands to pull my pants down from my hips; and then with no other warning he lifted me up, turned, and set me down on the table.  Complimentary fruit flew from its bowl onto the floor.  He pressed hard against me, and I felt his swollen flesh grinding into mine, desperate to be freed.  I reached down to help him.  I felt the hard rod fall forward into my hands, but before I could look or do anything else he grabbed me again by the hips and pulled me forward onto himself, thrust into me with a sharp exhale and a fierce grin.  He set his pace hard and fast, fingers dug deep into my flesh to draw me close, moaning.

I hoped he would not _talk._   Foolish talk is the ruin of sex.  Happily, he did not.  I aided in this by lifting a breast toward him in one hand and urging his head down toward it with the other.  He took the nipple between his lips, raked it lightly with his teeth:  but this angle between us compromised speed and depth, and he did not consent to that for long.  He threw me down across the table and covered me, pounded into me fiercely, so deep that the end of each thrust was a collision, and I groaned at the intensity of it, a long low sound broken into pieces by each impact. 

And that only made him fiercer.  And then rhythm abandoned him, and he shook, and crowed, and fell forward onto me, gasping.  He stayed there for a long moment, resting on his elbows with his face inches from mine.  He touched his forehead to mine, took one deep breath, smiled.  He traced his tongue up the long point of my ear.  Then he rose and fastened his pants.  As I sat up and rose from the table, he collected his shirt and put it back on.

“I got the room for you,” he said.  “I have other accommodations.  I hope you will think about what I said before.”  With no more conversation than that, he left me for the night.

 

 

So I slept there, and started my journey in the morning.  The room was already paid for, after all, and the bed was very nice.

Malada was further away than I’d ventured from the city before, and the trip was long.  The mountains were lovely, and I collected a good many herbs I hadn’t had ever found wild before; but further from civilization there were more nuisances from bandits and beasts, and the walk became more and more difficult.  I started to wish for a horse.

High on a ridge near my destination I encountered a handful of armed men.  “Men” is a poor generic term, since they were neither all human nor all male, but such are the foibles of our common tongue.  They claimed to be hunters, out enjoying the mountain air:  unlikely, given that they were all wearing suits of armor, but it seemed safer not to press for a more realistic answer.  They let me by, and I assumed that meant that their business, whatever it was, was not with me.

After Claude’s dire warnings, I had really expected better of Malada.  But other than being on the verge of collapse, it seemed to hold no greater dangers than those I had already faced elsewhere.

That, of course, was on the inside.  Outside, I discovered that I had been wrong about the men.  They were gathered and waiting for me at the door, and behind them – behind them was Claude, on his horse, looking down at me. 

“I would like for you to give me the carving,” he said.

“Would you!” I snapped.  “I would like for _you_ to tell your friends to get out of my way.”

“Come now, Tavi, this is nothing personal.  I like you.  But I can’t let it get into Umbacano’s head that you’re actually better at this than I am, and if I allow you to take him something I told him couldn’t be had, it’s not going to look good.”

I scowled up at him.  “But if you sell it to him yourself, you’re still his main man.  Even though you’re actually a coward who steals from women.”

“I wish you didn’t insist on taking it personally.  Seriously now, give them the carving so we can all go our separate ways.  No harm done.”

I don’t know what made me so stubborn.  The principle of the thing, maybe.  My general poverty.  Fear of a group of armed strangers.  The fact that I’d let this man fuck me on a table, and now he wanted to steal from me under the implied threat of violence.  I hadn’t mistaken our tryst for a romance, but this was just insulting.

“I’m not giving it to you.  It’s for Umbacano, and _I_ did the work, and _I_ am getting the credit and the payment for it.”

He frowned at me, and his thugs did likewise.  “Now you’re just being unreasonable.  I did do the research.”

“Then you should have done the footwork too, if you meant to be the one who got paid.  I took all the risk.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.  “Damn.  I really didn’t want it to go this way, Tavi.”  He started to turn his horse, and as he did, his bruisers glowered at me menacingly.  He said the rest over his shoulder, like an afterthought.  “Kill her.”

Kill me!

I screamed, hurled the energy born of my panic in the direction of his head.  After that I had to focus on his henchmen.  Usually I favored a good spell from a safe hiding place, but there wasn’t the time or space for that, and I had to fall back on crude blasts and my meager skill with a sword.  I acquitted myself well enough to come away alive and still in possession of my carving.

I almost tripped over his body, my head too full of weariness and betrayal to watch where I was going.  I had killed Claude, knocked him from his horse with my blast: he lay unmoving in my path, a faint look of surprise still frozen on his otherwise blank face.  I focused on that because it helped me ignore how much of the back side of his head I had burned away.  I was still so angry that I kicked him, once, but strangely, that made me instantly remorseful in a way that killing him didn’t.

A few days ago this man had been inside me, in a room he’d paid for, and now he was dead.  Just because neither of us wanted to share.

It was the first time I’d killed someone I had known, someone not a highwayman or a necromancer, and it felt very strange.  I erected a crude sort of cairn for him, supposing that to be right.  But I took his lovely elven sword for myself, because he owed me something.

 


	3. Cities in Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi receives an invitation from the Dark Brotherhood, which she refuses, and a plea for help from a monk of Talos, which she accepts.

I brought home the carving, and the Ancestor from Mackamentain into the bargain, and got myself a room across the water at Weye.  I was in no mood to stay at the Tiber Septim again, even though I had some money.  I spent it on a few pieces of leather armor instead.  The work was getting more dangerous, and apparently I had as much to worry about from my friends as from my enemies.  But there was no going back:  I’d learned that my skill at making potions was worth barely more than the raw ingredients, and I would never make a comfortable living that way.  It was treasure hunting or nothing.  Well, I suppose I could have become a bandit, or prostituted myself on the Waterfront.  But I didn’t really see either of those as a viable option.  Even now, certain things remain beneath my dignity.

I woke to an unseasonable chill.

My eyes happened to stray to the corner opposite the bed.  Something was there, in the shadows.  Something vague and undefined…like the edges of a chameleon spell.

I’d grown much more wary.  I grabbed the dagger I kept beneath the pillow and leapt to my feet.  The cipher in the corner didn’t move, even though I could see now that it was of human shape.  Whoever it was, they were quite unconcerned about whether I was lying in bed or standing with a dagger raised.

The voice that came out of the darkness was honeyed frost.  “I am not here to hurt you, Tintaviel.”

He knew my full name.  The one I never told anyone.  That did not help in the slightest.  I pointed the dagger toward the voice and tried to look calm.  “Then state your business, and quickly.”

“I am here to deliver an invitation.”  The spell dropped and he stepped forward into the light, but it hardly made a difference.  He was shrouded in black from head to foot, only his pale, emotionless face visible.  “From the Dark Brotherhood.”

_The Dark Brotherhood?_   I had heard the stories, of course, as everyone had.  I had heard rumors that they recruited their members this way, stealing in and taking them as they slept.  I hadn’t imagined that the truth of the tales would be so literal.  But I could not doubt this man:  he radiated cold and malice.  He felt like death.

“Why?” I asked, and it only came out as a cowardly whisper.  “Why me?”

He smiled a little, and it did not warm his features in the least.  “Because you have proven capable.  You have already killed in cold blood.”

I frowned.  “No, I haven’t.”

“Haven’t you?  Is Claude Maric alive?”

“That – ”  I felt myself flushing as some of the fear changed into indignation.  “That was not _murder._   He was going to kill _me._ ”

“Really.  And yet his back was turned.”

“He had _told_ them to kill me.  It doesn’t _count._ ”  Angry tears, now.  Ah, brilliant!  Show your weakness to the assassin!

He still responded without violence – but with a low chuckle that was somehow even worse.  “As you say, then.  Still, it attracted our attention, and I have come to make you the offer.  You have the option of proving yourself worthy to join us as a child of Sithis and the Night Mother.  It is as loving and faithful a fellowship as you are likely to find in Cyrodiil.  All you would have to do is to kill one more man who deserves to die.”

I shuddered.  “Who are you to decide who deserves to die?”

“Who am I?”  He stepped closer, touched a gloved finger to my hand as he whispered the answer into my ear.  That he had to whisper upward made him no less menacing.  “I am a Speaker of the Dark Brotherhood.  I am a finger of the dreaded hand of Death itself.”  His finger stroked mine, once, and I trembled.  “But I do not decide.  We answer prayer, Tintaviel.  The Night Mother herself tells us the names of the chosen.  Shall I tell you whom she chose to be your victim?”

I stood, and shook, and said nothing.

I felt his smile widen:  it was too close to see.  “Silence becomes you.  His name is Rufio, and he is in hiding at the Inn of Ill Omen, down the Green Road to Bravil.  If you like, you may ask him yourself why he deserves death.  You may decide for yourself whether you agree.  And then, when you have killed him, I will find you.”  I felt him press something into my hand.  “You may use this.  Consider it a gift.”

His fingers tightened around mine, forcing me to keep hold of the thing, whatever it was.  “A gift,” I echoed.  “From the Dark Brotherhood.”

Even his breath in my ear was cold.  “A gift from Lucien.”

“Lucien.”  I took a deep breath, steadied myself at last.  “And what if I do not kill this man, Lucien?”

“Then he will live out his miserable days at the Inn of Ill Omen.  He is your test, and no one else will touch him.”

“And you…you will leave me alone?”

Another quiet laugh.  “You will not see me again until Rufio is dead.”

The difference between _yes, I will leave you alone_ and _you will not see me_ dropped my stomach to somewhere beneath the floor.  “That is not quite the answer to my question.”

“Is it not?  But it will have to do.  Do not hesitate, Tintaviel.  Your new family awaits you.”  He stepped back, and in the moment it took for me to regain my senses enough to move, he was already gone.

My dagger was lying at my feet.  I could not remember when I had dropped it.  In my hand instead was Lucien’s gift, and this I lifted to investigate.  It was another dagger, fine and lovely, silver with an ebony hilt.  But small.  Easy to handle in close quarters.

I shuddered again and dropped the thing on the nightstand.  My life in the Imperial City was taking a nasty turn, and I felt an urge to be somewhere very far away.  (And not down the Green Road.)  I grabbed my map and scanned it for distant ruins.

There were some out toward Chorrol.  Yes…and there was still that debt to be paid, wasn’t there?  I drew out the pouch where I always kept the Amulet.  Perhaps that was the source of this streak of bad luck:  perhaps it was the debt demanding to be paid.  A simple thing, to take this trinket to the monks.  Doubtless that would be the end of my involvement in lofty political affairs, and with my obligation cleared, my fortunes would have to rise.

I left the tavern, stopping to do a good turn for an old fisherman – this was all about good deeds, after all, cleaning my luck – and he repaid me with a magic ring that has always been among my most useful possessions.  I crossed to the Red Road and circled to the Black.  There is no point along the Red Road that lacks almost devastating beauty:  various combinations of the gorgeous waters and trees of the Heartlands and breathtaking views of the Imperial City.  In many ways coming and going from the city is better than actually being there.

I was new to the West Weald:  it offered me another new set of herbs, which I collected happily, even knowing now how little they were worth to me.  I didn’t stop anywhere to sleep.  Sleeping without a locked door between me and the world was starting to feel unwise.  Then again, hadn’t I locked the door at the inn?  I thought I had.  I couldn’t remember for sure.  I wondered how little a trifle like that mattered to someone like Lucien.  Then I shook it off and kept walking, keeping myself alert by marveling at the brilliant violet spray of stars.

I was fairly exhausted when I reached the priory.  The monks politely showed me up to the office where Jauffre sat at his over-sized desk.  He heard my story with a skeptical look on his face – some elven _girl_ , and a prisoner at that, taken into the last confidence of his Emperor?  (It would not be the last time I thought I detected an air of sexism in the old man, and in his Order generally.  I have never found a _nunnery_ dedicated to Talos.) 

His doubts evaporated when I pulled the red jewel out of my pouch.  And without pause, without any acknowledgement that he had changed from a previous position about my competence and worthiness, he started to insist that _I_ must go and find this secret heir he had hidden away in Kvatch – this Martin.  That _I_ must rescue him from this great and imminent danger.

Yes, I.  Not Jauffre; not any of his order of warrior monks.  The elven girl.  The treasure hunter.  _He_ , the warrior monk, would stay and keep the treasure safe.  Completely logical division of labor.

He was indifferent to my concerns.  “It’s my hope that you can spirit him away quietly; and that sort of affair sounds more like your skill than mine.  We will offer you any assistance we can, of course.  We have some weapons and armor, if you are in need of those.”  I said that I was not.  He looked me up and down, and I felt as if he finally saw me for the first time.  “You haven’t slept.”

“No.”

“There’s an inn at Chorrol.  I will pay for the room if you can’t afford it.”

My voice was harsher than I meant it to be.  “I don’t want to stay at the inn.”

His face softened a little.  “I understand.  These are troubled times.  I’m sure it was a difficult journey for a young woman, alone.”  That was my relationship with Jauffre, at first:  somehow he could assign me to great perils, and doubt my girlish ability to survive them, and pity me for the necessity, all at once.  “And yet I don’t know how else to accommodate you.  It would be most awkward to house you here, even for one night.”

“I realize that.”  I sighed, rubbed at my temples.  I really was tired.  “I will go to the inn.  I didn’t mean to be unreasonable.”

“Do you need money?”

“No, I can cover it.”

“Go then.  Rest, and conduct whatever business you need to in Chorrol.  But don’t delay too long:  I fear for Martin.”

As I left, Prior Maborel offered me something more useful:  a horse.  A lovely old paint horse, which he fetched with me from Eronor in the Priory’s stable.  After the long, mostly uphill walk to Chorrol, I was immensely grateful.

So I went into the city proper, and fell in love with its grand houses, and its great oak, and Dar-Ma, the Argonian girl who greeted me like a sister the instant I set foot inside the city walls.  And I got a cheap room at the Grey Mare, next to a room that was being rented long-term to Earana, who was as arrogant and condescending an Altmer woman as I had ever met.  Over dinner she disdained my pragmatic travel clothes and scoffed at my hedge-wizardry.  She also dropped several hints about her scorn for the Mages’ Guild chapter in town, and particularly for a fellow named Teekeeus.

Naturally, given the tender warmth I was developing for her myself, I felt a desire to meet her nemesis.  He was an amiable Argonian gentleman – I was beginning to have a soft spot in my heart for Argonians – who invited me to join the Mages’ Guild, and promised me a recommendation if I would…thwart a desire of Earana’s.

Well, _naturally_ I would, even though it meant having another conversation with her in the morning.  First I slept.  Tried to sleep, anyway, after locking the door as many times as it was built to allow, and propping a chair against it.  Still, it was better than no rest at all.

It was a book she wanted, of magic I was “incapable” of understanding.  She promised to teach me the spell once she learned it.  The job of getting the book itself was an easy one for someone of my background; and flipping through it, I realized to my eternal shame that she was right, and I couldn’t read it.  So I decided to split the difference:  I gave her the book, let her learn the spell and teach it to me, and _then_ I stole the book back out of her room and gave it to Teekeeus.  He suspected me of it, but still, he had the book, and he gave me my letter.  Something for everyone, everybody happy.

And that was my noble entry into the Mages’ Guild.

But of course I was stalling.  I didn’t really want to go on Jauffre’s fool errand, especially if he was right about it being a dangerous fool errand.  I finally left after one more night of bad sleep at the Grey Mare.  Then, still stalling, I swung through Wendir to collect another Ancestor, although by now I wasn’t sure when I’d be getting back to the Imperial City to get paid for it.  For all I knew, there was another jerk like Claude out there who would move in on my territory if I didn’t keep bringing home the goods.

I rode down through the Colovian Highlands.  Yes, nice and obscure, far from the cities and roads.  There couldn’t be any spies from the Brotherhood way out there, nobody watching me to see if I was going to do their bidding as a professional murderer or not.  The worry actually started to fade a little, and with it my worries about the unfriendly nature of the world in general.  I was doing my bit, after all.  Maybe I would look up the Mages’ Guild in Kvatch, get another letter, another step toward admission to the Arcane University.  They’d know all sorts of secrets about alchemy and big blasty spells there.  I could live there safe and sound, exploring ruins in my spare time.  That would be marvelous.

I can’t describe what it was like to ride up into Kvatch.  I suppose I don’t need to:  I suppose that almost everyone alive now can remember for themselves what it’s like to watch the sky slowly turn red above them, and feel the world slip dangerously off kilter.  The guards who watched helpless outside the walls told me the story I was to keep hearing across Cyrodiil:  the Gates, the daedra, the destruction.  And also this:  that Martin was not among those who had come out of the city before this particular Gate had blocked the way.

People call it heroic that I went into the Gate.  That was the day the word “Hero” began to be applied to me.  But it was as simple as this:  I was responsible.  I had dawdled, first in the capital and then in Chorrol, knowing that a Daedric cult had gone mad and was plotting against the Empire.  I had put off fulfilling the dying wish of the man who had ruled the known world.  If his beloved secret child was already dead somewhere in this city, _it was my fault._

There are not sufficient words for the awfulness of Oblivion.  The very land and air writhe and scream in torment.  The few plants that grow there – yes, even then, I took the time to collect samples, ever committed to my craft – are either poisonous or unnaturally _active._   Of the lesser daedra and their devices, of course, people know all too well.

  
Be that as it may, I plucked the first of the moaning black orbs from the pinnacle of their horrible towers, and the Gate was shut.  Reality trembled around me, cracked, and reshaped itself again into the wastes surrounding Kvatch.  The soldiers cheered and ran into the city to fight the remaining demons and search for survivors.  Without thinking, I volunteered to help take the castle back from the enemy.  The threat I’d been trying to philosophize away since Uriel’s death was real to me now, real and personal, and I was swept forward by the outrage.

The Count was already dead when we found him.  And that brought my mind back to my real objective.  Martin!  How easily distracted I was, first by selfishness and then by misplaced heroism.  I rushed back to the ruined temple.

I gazed at the charred walls, the broken spires, the absent or blackened glass of once-lovely windows.  This had been a temple to Akatosh himself, who my people call Auri-El.  The great dragon, so holy that even the war between elves and men had not tainted his worship.  Anger swept through me again, and I strode into the temple as if looking for more demons to kill.

Instead I literally ran into a quiet man in a blue robe as he was ministering to an injured soldier.  He turned and looked at me with bright, unquiet eyes.  The color of the robe complimented them splendidly.

I did not need to be told.  If the Emperor had been a young, handsome priest, he would have been this man.  “You…you are Martin?” I stammered out, in lieu of any apology.

“Yes,” he said.  “I am Martin.”  His voice was rich and golden, another inheritance from his father.

Somehow this turned me into an idiot.  “You are the priest of Akatosh.”

He sighed.  “Yes, I am the priest.  Do you need a priest?  Of course you do.  Because clearly the gods stand ready to help us – ” He stopped short, forced himself to take a deep breath.

He was as broken by this as I was.  That wasn’t hopeful.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m having trouble understanding the gods right now.  What…what do you need?  Are you hurt?”  His eyes swept up and down my body for injuries. 

I had to get a hold of myself.  It didn’t matter how haunted his eyes were or how beautiful his voice was.  “I need you to come with me.  Jauffre has sent me to fetch you.  You’re in danger here.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.  “How does that make me different from everyone else in Kvatch?”

Well, now, that was not information that everyone left in the city needed to have, was it?  “Most of them aren’t the Emperor’s son,” I whispered. 

“What!”  I saw the sneer of disbelief starting to form.

“This is a conversation I would prefer to have in private,” I added.

He frowned, gave a curt nod, took me by the elbow, and walked briskly with me down the steps to the priests’ quarters.

“I am _not_ the Emperor’s son,” he growled.  “My father was a farmer.”

I almost laughed at his denial.  Peasant stock, obviously.  Thence the carriage of princes and the voice of a god.  “And that is why the Grandmaster of the Blades took a personal interest in your upbringing.  Of course.”

He looked puzzled.  “Jauffre is the – no.  No, it’s not possible.”

“The daedra were here to find _you._   We have to get you to safety.”

Puzzlement into horror.  “To find _me?_  Why would they come to find _me?_ …Because I am the Emperor’s son….” He fell back a step, mortified.

I’d just made the destruction of his city and his temple into his personal responsibility.  I’d just broken his unwittingly regal heart.  There, excellent!  “I’m sorry,” I said, touching his arm, like that was going to fix it.  “But I need to get you away from here.”

But just then soldiers blustered in to find us.  They wanted Martin to get back to healing people, and me to hear reports of what was going on in the castle, because now I was the Hero of Kvatch and they assumed I should be apprised of that kind of thing.  Martin’s eyes widened as he watched them report to me, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to giving him the first idea of who I was.  I’d been asking him to follow a total stranger into the wilderness.  _I_ wouldn’t have gone with me.

Martin promised we’d be along shortly and waved them away.  “What is your name?” he asked quietly.

“Tavi.”  In my head I kicked myself again.

“And you are the Hero of Kvatch.  You’ve given them hope.  I…let me make sure there are enough healers left to take care of the survivors.  Then I’ll come with you.”  He bowed his lovely head like a meek lamb, locks of his dark hair falling into his face.  “My life is in your hands.”

And that, in all honesty, was the most terrifying moment of my life.

 


	4. Lonely in Your Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi and Martin get acquainted in the most romantic available way: camping while on the run from cultist assassins, heads still freshly full of trauma.

They were sorry to see him go, and not just because he was a priest in a city left ravaged by demons.  They loved him.  Who wouldn’t have?  Anyone would have told you, without knowing the whole truth of it, that he was divine.

I led him back up through the wilderness, avoiding the roads now out of fear for his safety more than mine.  I couldn’t imagine that anyone had ever seen him and _not_ realized he must be related to the Emperor.  I suppose I should have considered how few people, other than Council members, Blades, and myself, had really seen and spoken to the Emperor up close.  Still, someone had managed to figure it out, because there was no other reason to attack Kvatch.  And I had no idea who that person or persons might be, or where they were now.  Better to be cautious.

We rode quietly through the day.  When night fell, I realized that I couldn’t just force him to ride nonstop all the way back to the Priory, as my paranoia might have demanded for just myself.  Reluctantly, I found us a campsite.

“There’s only one tent,” he pointed out, helpfully declaring the obvious.

“I’ll sleep outside,” I told him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” I snapped, and then, feeling wicked for it, I added, “Wait here, and I will get us some kindling for a fire.”

I tortured myself a bit while I busied myself with my errand.  It wasn’t his fault I found him attractive.  It wasn’t his fault I had stopped trusting men I found attractive, or that I was jumping at shadows for fear they were assassins.  There was no reason to be _rude._

When I came back, he had taken off his sword and sat down on one of the weathered little benches surrounding the fire pit.  That he owned a sword had surprised me, but it seemed prudent enough to carry something for self-defense, out in the world.

I lit the fire while he brought out the water skins and the meager rations he had allowed us to take – not too much, not when Kvatch was already left with so little.  We were quiet again for a while, which felt awkward since the last words between us had been my fit of temper.  The sky darkened, and the fire beneath it was lovely.

“Tavi?” he said, and like a fool I looked at the fire dancing in his eyes.

“Yes?”

His face was warmer than it had been in Kvatch, relaxing a bit at this distance from the tragedy.  “In the seminary…they did discourage us from attacking women while they sleep.  It is frowned upon in the priesthood.”

I laughed.  “Of course it is.  I’m sorry I was short with you.  Personal baggage.”

“But you’re going to insist on sleeping outside.”

“…Yes.  I am.”

His face was full of quiet concern.  “Do you not feel safe with me?”

I didn’t want to have this conversation.  “It has nothing to do with you.  It has to do with – with a time when I was stupid.  Have you ever done something that was really _stupid?_ ”

The faint ghost of a smile, bewitching.  “Yes, actually.  Any number of things.”

Ah, good.  He was beautiful, he was royal, he was holy, and now he was _interesting._   “Really!  Perhaps if you told me one of yours, I’d tell you mine.”

A cloud passed over his face, and he looked back into the fire.  “Perhaps another time.  I will not press you.  But you may have the tent yourself.”

I responded too quickly.  “No.  I’d be trapped.”  Then I caught myself.  “Oh.  That’s not quite what….”

He looked at me too softly to bear.  “Something that hurtful.  I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said, waving my arms around, “no, no, no.  I’m sure I’ve given you the wrong idea.  Look, I spend a lot of time out exploring ruins, and it’s dangerous, and I’m a bit overcautious.  All right?”

“All right.”

“All right.”  But it was hard to close myself off to him that far, and against my better judgment I added, “…and, well, men don’t make much sense to me.  I’m better at wolves and goblins.”

“I see.”  He laughed.  “If it will please you, I will sleep alone in the tent and behave myself.  I don’t want to be compared unfavorably to a goblin.”

“Thank you.”  I took a drink from my water skin so he wouldn’t see me smile.  “I know it must seem excessive.  Priests of Akatosh are celibate, aren’t they?”

“No,” he admitted.  “Chaste to marriage, but not celibate.”

Oh dear.  I’d only brought it up assuming they _were_ celibate, to get him to say it out loud, to remove him from my head as a potential object of desire.  “Chaste” wasn’t quite up to the job.  Now we _really_ couldn’t share the tent.

Although.

Although I was really no safer from Lucien, or from any other real or imagined danger, outside the tent than inside.  And inside would be safer from some kinds of things, not to mention warmer.  And his aura absolutely hummed with power, which I attributed to the blessings of his god, his vocation as a priest.  And he _had_ been awfully lucky in Kvatch, emerging unharmed from the catastrophe that had laid waste to a city just to reach him.  Maybe Auri-El would be watching over that tent, and it would be impervious to the Dark Brotherhood, daedra, and all comers.

And he couldn’t betray me if all we did was sleep.  And I didn’t have anything I thought he wanted enough to kill me for.

Such a short history to have built up this much complication in my psyche.

“Very well.”

He cocked his head, confused.  “Very well?”

I was rounding the corner from idiotic to insane.  He was going to think I belonged to Sheogorath.  “Very well, I will share the tent.”

He grinned, and it was as if his eyes filled with their own azure light.  Damn.  “I’ve convinced you that I’m harmless?”  And I imagined that there was something flirtatious, something not at all priestlike, in the tone of the question.

“You are not within a mile of harmless,” I muttered, and then fought back the urge to bite off my own tongue.  “But it’s getting cold, and I can’t take you to Jauffre if I freeze to death.”

Sometimes men make the assumption that all elves are naturally at home out in the wild:  put us at a campsite or in the woods and somehow a Bosmer appears, no matter what we are in the city.  But Martin said nothing about my inability to sleep comfortably outdoors on an autumn night.  He only said, “No, you can’t,” and offered me a strip of dried meat.

Campsite tents are small, and it was close quarters for two.  I spread our blankets.  “Back to back,” I announced.  He stretched out with his back turned to me, obliging, and I curled up as tight as I could at the other side of the tent, which is to say that I managed to bend my arms and legs just a bit before I either had to put my feet outside or let my shoulder blades come into contact with his.  Grudgingly I chose the latter.  He sighed.

I lay there for ages, not sleeping.  I listened to every cracking branch wondering what it was; I felt the pressure of his back against mine; I contemplated what a wreck I was and how I’d ever managed to make my living exploring dangerous ruins with this temperament.

He stirred, carefully shifted onto his back.  “You’re not asleep,” he whispered.

“Neither are you.”

“Sometimes I don’t sleep.  And tonight I have a lot to think about.”

“What are you thinking about?”

He didn’t respond right away.  “Jauffre,” he said at last.  “Kvatch.”

Perfectly reasonable answers.  They shouldn’t have disappointed me.  “Of course.  I know it’s a lot to absorb, but Jauffre will know what to do next.”

“I hope so.”  Another pause.  “And why are you still awake, Tavi?”

“I thought we’d agreed that this wasn’t the night we were going to trade our secrets.”

“Fair enough.”  I felt the back of a hand brush against my shoulder.  “You’re cold.  I…you will be warmer if I turn to face you.  If you will allow it.”

I was cold, true enough.  Cold, and embarrassingly afraid of having a man this close to me after Claude and Lucien.  As usual, it made me unfairly hostile.  “A service commonly provided by the priesthood?” I hissed.

“No.  But you’d said you didn’t want to freeze to death.  I know you don’t want me to ask what has you so frightened – ”

I wanted to bark back at him that I wasn’t frightened at all, but even I knew what an obvious lie that would be.  So I breathed deep.  “I’ve made mistakes, Martin.  I’ve made enemies.  It’s not that I don’t feel safe with _you_.  I just don’t feel safe.”

“I understand.”  Two words, but they were words with weight the way he said them – as if he understood not only in a theoretical sense but because he was thinking of mistakes and enemies that would make me shudder.

Well, and by the Nine, Tavi, why shouldn’t he understand not feeling safe?  _Demons had just torn his city apart, looking for him._   He…he might need the comfort himself, and not be able to ask for it.  That was probably wishful thinking, but it was a pleasant wish, and it made enough sense to me to break through my false belligerence.

“I’m sorry, Martin.  I don’t mean to be so distrustful.  Turn whichever way you will.”  I gulped.  “I would like to be warmer.”

He adjusted carefully again, not intruding more on my side of the tent than was necessary.  The point of contact was now the entire back side of my body, as he curled in to meet me from head to feet.  After a moment, he draped his arm over my waist – gingerly at first, but when I did not protest, it settled, weighed comfortably down on me, demanding nothing else.  I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, and perversely, that woke up every other nerve in my body.  I wanted more.

I did not want to want more.

On the other hand, the warmth that radiated from his body to mine was soothing, and eventually that lulled me into something approximating sleep.

 


	5. Watching the Snow Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leaving the amulet with the monks ends the way Tavi suspected it would. Maybe Sky Ruler Temple will be safer. Then again, maybe the Blades will be almost as adamant about protecting Martin from women as from cultists.

He rose before I did, while I was only half awake and still hazy.  His hand brushed slowly over my waist and my hip as he moved away, like a lover’s hand, departing the object of its favor only with reluctance.

I really had to stop thinking this way.

This time we rode and traded idle chatter.  I told him about the Ancestors and the Mages’ Guild.  He nodded, said he’d guessed me a mage, told me to be cautious choosing my friends and my studies if I made Apprentice.  A typical priest’s warning, that:  it wasn’t unusual for them to distrust any power that wasn’t obviously straight out of the hands of one of the Nine.  He told me about Kvatch as it had been, a lovely city of stone – “like a warmer Skingrad,” he said, but that meant nothing to me as I had never seen Skingrad.  But I nodded and smiled like I understood, because I wanted to listen to him talk, because his voice flowed over me like sun on skin. 

I’d nearly forgotten that there was any urgency to our journey when we turned up the last road to the priory and saw their Dunmer stable hand running for his life, and behind him – behind him, curses and ruin on them all, one of Dagon’s madmen in his red cloak and mask, giving pursuit with sword raised.

“ _No!_ ” I screamed, leaping down from my horse and throwing fire.  There were more of them emerging from the buildings and from the direction of the stable.  No, I hadn’t made things worse with my tardiness again.  No, Jauffre and the Amulet were not in danger.  No, I hadn’t just led my pretty priest into a death trap.  No, no, _no._

  
Eronor fled out of range of my frantic blasts as one cultist and then another flailed, shrieked, and fell burning.  I aimed at a third – and then clutched back the spell, singing my own fingers.  Martin the priest, the man who had placidly assured me that his life was in my hands, had drawn his sword and surged forward into my line of fire.  As I growled in impatient fear and drew a knife to join in the close combat, he dispatched the remaining enemy with just a few graceful strokes.  He was better with a blade than I was.

Then he stood and frowned down at his would-be killer as if troubled.

I was imagining what would have happened if my reflexes had been slower:  I was imagining the back of his head looking the way I’d left Claude’s.  “Be more careful!” I yelled, closing the distance between us.

“He’s just a boy,” Martin murmured.  “He had no skill.  Just rage.”

“They’re not trained fighters,” I snarled, sick of the sight of them.  “They’re zealots.”  I hurried into the main house, where I found Prior Maborel’s dead body.  There wasn’t time to feel sorry:  Eronor scurried in after me.

“The Grandmaster is in the chapel,” he cried.  I went out again and paced off in that direction, but had to start trotting to keep up with Martin, who began to run _ahead_ of me.  Thus taking my best weapon out of my arsenal, again.  What was wrong with him?  Did he _want_ to be killed by friendly fire?

Martin threw the door open, sword in hand, and revealed half a dozen agents surrounding Jauffre in front of the altar.  Jauffre, at least, had apparently been better prepared for the attack than poor Prior Maborel:  his sword was in his hand.  “Your timing is excellent,” he said, with no more obvious feeling than if he had meant that dinner was ready.

“I’ll take the one on the left,” Martin replied, as Jauffre turned right and they left me to come up the center.

The priest and the monk, coolly trading quips and assigning opponents as if it were just a training exercise, just a game they had come up with one night while drunk in a tavern. 

At the time, I did not realize that the nature of reality is Death, that a game was all it really was.  I didn’t even have the awareness to gawk at their sudden transformation from religious men into warriors.  I did wonder if Martin quite understood that as the main target and the last hope for Tamriel he really ought to stay out of the fighting, but there was no time to ask him.  I spun and sank my dagger into the nearest of my enemies, and listened with a disturbing satisfaction as the name of his false god drowned in a gargling of blood. 

I don’t remember any more how many fell to whom.  I took my share, and it made me glad.  I turned my weapon in my hand as I stooped to wipe it against my last foe’s cloak, and it occurred to me to look at it.  I had pulled it by instinct, the smallest weapon I had, for fear of hurting Martin with a reckless swing.

It was Lucien’s dagger.  I had forgotten I had it.  I had never meant to bring it out of Weye.

As I turned that thought over unpleasantly in my head, I realized that the two men were both waiting for me to speak.  I turned to Jauffre first, and asked the obvious question, already fearing that the fact he hadn’t already answered it was, itself, the answer.

My voice came out thick with dread.  “Where is the Amulet?”

He muttered something about a “secret room” and ran back toward the main house.  Martin looked to me before turning to follow.  I waved him on and came behind, but I already knew.  I knew before we had even gone up the stairs in the main house to where the “secret” door stood open.  I knew as the three of us stood there, Jauffre searching in half-concealed alarm and Martin watching perplexed.  I’d known all along that Jauffre had done this the wrong way round.

The Amulet was gone.

I was shaking, enraged.  I dropped to my knees because it kept me from surging forward and throttling him.  If I’d had the Amulet, it would have been safe.  It _had_ been safe, when I had it.  I knew how to carry a valuable, secret thing.  But I’d given it to a monk, and instantly, it was gone.

This was useless, this fury.  I had to think.

This cult, this Mythic Dawn.  I had to learn what else was precious to them, what kind of a place they would choose to hide their precious things.

Did I?  Or did I have to figure out where to hide the thing that was precious to me?

“All right.”  I made an effort to slow my breathing.  “All right, Jauffre.  What now?”

He echoed my thought, after his cold-blooded fashion.  “At least Martin is alive.  There is still hope.  But I must keep him safe, and obviously I cannot do so here.”  He frowned.  “We will go to Cloud Ruler Temple, the stronghold of the Blades.  It is strong enough against both steel and magicka to buy us time to think.”

“And against spies, Jauffre?”

“There has never been such a thing as a traitorous Blade.”

“Hmm.”  Still, it was the best plan on offer, in that it was the only one.  I rose to my feet.  “As you say, then.  Let’s go.”

I thought that Martin smiled, a little.  Jauffre looked perplexed.  “You have been of great service, of course, but I can impose no further on you.  And the Temple is sacred to the Blades.”

“To those in service to the crown,” Martin clarified.

Jauffre stiffened.  “To the Emperor and his family.  To the blood, not the government.”

“To _my_ blood.”  I could see the discomfort flash through Martin’s eyes as he said it, but he went on.  “There was a stable portal to Oblivion at Kvatch.  It should be impossible.  She went _into_ it, closed it from inside, to find me.  I owe her my life.  If she is willing to come, I want her with us.”

Again without a hint that he had ever felt another way, Jauffre inclined his head.  “Of course, Martin.  She will be welcome.”

Jauffre’s presence made it harder to engage in idle, pleasant banter as we rode north.  The talk was mostly business:  what I knew about the Gate, what Jauffre and Martin could conjecture from that – and what Martin could conjecture turned out to be a surprisingly great deal.  He knew the ins and outs of conjuration and daedric lore as well as I would have expected him to know the niceties of theology or ritual.  An awkward conversation about why Martin had been raised as he had, ignorant of himself:  because he was a bastard child, and because Uriel’s talent as a seer had stirred and told him to keep the boy hidden.  Then there was some exchange about the Blades and how they would expect to be treated by their sovereign.  That was little use to me, so I pondered how many more facets my warrior-wizard-priest was going to reveal, and scanned the rising cliffs for crazed killers.

None came.  I humbly submit that the Jerall Mountains were too cold for them.  Certainly they were too cold for me.  The little side roads we were taking for privacy had led up into the snowy heights more quickly than the main roads would have, and by the time we camped I was miserable in my thin, Heartland-friendly clothes.

I don’t think Jauffre would ever have noticed, but Martin did.  I was standing against a tree as Jauffre lit the fire some little distance away, and Martin brought me a cloak.

“Thank you,” I said, chattering.  He wrapped it around my shoulders himself, and as a distraction from making more of that than I should I said, “You’re rather more a warrior than I expected.”

He chuckled.  “I had a little training, before I took my vows.  My real passion was magic.”  He grinned, with a light in his eyes that was surprisingly close to being mischief.  “When I warned you against wizards, you thought I was being superstitious.”

“Perhaps.”  I let myself smile back a little.  “Was it your faith that made you give up wizardry?”

“It’s more that wizardry compelled me to take refuge in faith.”  But Jauffre intruded before I could coax out more of the story, asking us if we wanted water boiled for hot drinks.  So it was back to the three of us for the evening, and back to shop talk.  Then Jauffre also insisted, for propriety, that he and Martin stay in one tent and I freeze alone in the other.  Of course he didn’t put it quite that way, but it was the result.

Cloud Ruler Temple looked like it was perched on the top of the world, and was surrounded by walls higher and grander than I’d seen anywhere but the Imperial City.  A lot of devotion and a lot of money had been channeled here, over a lot of time.

Outside the gates Jauffre turned and regarded me with a sober expression.  “We are about to enter sacred ground.  No one has ever set foot there who was not either one of us, or a member of the royal family.”  He paused.  “You have done heroic service for Uriel Septim and for Martin, and that makes you our ally.  If you are willing to continue in Martin’s service, I invite you to join the Blades, and enter the temple as our sister.”

I blinked at him.  I hadn’t expected any such thing.  But I supposed from the speech that he would really rather not let me inside if I didn’t agree.  I gulped and nodded, hoping I was agreeing to answer to Martin and not to Jauffre or, worse, some strange soldier I didn’t even know.  Jauffre smiled, gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulders, and waved up for the gates to be opened.  Jauffre gave the news of Martin’s existence and presence to the guards in a quick, perfunctory tone, and they ran ahead of us shouting.

  
Word spread quickly, and by the time we had stabled the horses and walked to the stone steps leading up to the great temple itself, we were mobbed.

The Blades greeted Martin by swarming out of the complex, cheering, some even weeping in relief:  but Jauffre reimposed order quickly, and they fell into formation around the steps and cried out formal hails for Martin _Septim._   He was quite taken aback; I would even say mortified.  When Jauffre invited him to speak, it was all he could do to stammer out humble thanks for their hospitality.  He promised to try to learn how to be the Emperor.  They all stared up at him, adoring but puzzled – what had they expected! – and at last Jauffre released them back to their duties, and himself wandered away inside, leaving us on the steps, Martin aghast and me compelled to try to soothe him.

“That wasn’t very convincing, was it?” he grimaced.  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to _do._   I never thought of being an Emperor.  I’m only a man.”

I took his hand.  “You will learn it.  You learned magic, and fighting, and religion.  You can learn this.”

He looked aside, deep in thought.  “It all seems to hinge on the Dragonfires – they are relit at every coronation using the Amulet.  It must be the fire itself that enforces the boundary between us and Oblivion.”

“Then we must certainly get the Amulet back.”

He nodded.  “Yes.  So that we – I – can relight the Dragonfires.”  He squeezed my hand a little.  “I’m glad you came.  I can’t imagine having to face this with no one but Jauffre to talk to.”

But when we went up into the temple, we were pulled apart for separate tours.  For my part, I saw the barracks, and the training rooms, and the armory, and the library, and the dining hall.  There was brief, hand-waving reference to private quarters, and from the door in question Martin emerged with his own guide.  He only barely had time to acknowledge seeing me before they hurried him off in another direction.

Still, those were not bad days.  I had a cot among the other female Blades; and although the barracks were huge and often bitterly cold, I slept better than I had in weeks.  It was hard to imagine less fertile ground for membership in the Dark Brotherhood than among the Blades.  They were full of noble ideals – and to be more blunt, they had the political standing to do away with their enemies outright, rather than sneaking up on them in the dark.  And there was no question of anyone getting onto the grounds without leave.

They offered me armor, which proved heavier than I liked to wear, and training with swords, which I accepted happily.  Despite all the time that Jauffre and the other high-ranking officers kept Martin isolated for intensive training in his new role, they had to let him eat, and at the common meals he insisted on having me at his table.  We deliberately talked about anything else but matters of rule.  I showed him the Ancestor I was still carrying, and we talked about elves, ruins, and treasure hunting.  He taught me to understand the uneasy marriage the state religion had formed between elven and Nord pantheons.  We appraised the Order’s book collection, which was not bad for a military institution.  We complained about the cold.  _I_ complained about the rigid disciplines, about which he was more philosophical, comparing them to the disciplines of being a chapel priest.

Yes, that was right, he was a priest of Auri-El, and chaste.  Best remember that.  I kept wanting to forget.

The day came when my residence at Cloud Ruler Temple ended, as good things must.  Jauffre approached me in the central hall.

“Sister Tavi,” he said, “I have a matter to bring to your attention.  Do you remember Baurus?”

I thought.  “He was with the Emperor the day he died.  He was the one who sent me to you.”

Jauffre nodded.  “He has remained in the city, looking for leads to the Mythic Dawn.  He is going to need assistance, and he has requested that I send you.”

Go back to the Imperial City?  Where I had spent most of my time in my other life, where there were shops, where I could finally sell my goods to Umbacano, where it was warm?

Without Martin?

I frowned, and Jauffre saw my reluctance.  “You wonder why he should have asked for you specifically.  Your fame has been growing while you’ve hidden here, Sister.  You will find that a surprising number of people know of the Hero of Kvatch.  Perhaps you can put that regard to some use.”

I considered this.  I had wanted to find the Mythic Dawn, and I was being given the chance to do so.  I should have been happier.

Not that it was really a _request_ in any case.  Refusing an assignment from the Grandmaster would not have been a choice well received by my peers.  So I bowed my head in assent.  “As you say, Grandmaster.  May I…may I tell Martin myself that I am leaving?”

He smiled a little.  “Only because you are his friend.”  But then he furrowed his brow, as if that bothered him.  “Sister Tavi?  Although you should depart soon, I do not think it is urgent that you go straight into the capital.  You’re something of a wizard, aren’t you?  Make a brief tour of the cities, visit the Guild halls, and get yourself access to the Arcane University.  We have friends there, and that will be most useful.  And I think it will be heartening to the populace to see their Hero among them.”

Was he trying to be rid of me?  I scanned his face, which remained quite bland and friendly.  No.  There was no reason for it; and his logic was sound, assuming that this “Hero of Kvatch” business was true.  And again, there had been a time when I really wanted access to the University.

I went and gathered my things.  And lo and behold, there was Lucien’s knife in the chest by my cot, waiting for me.  I was sure I’d abandoned it at Weynon Priory.  There went all sense of safety as well as my good cheer, and I hadn’t even left the grounds yet.

I came back to Jauffre to tell him I was ready, and he escorted me back into the private wing.  The walls here were little more than screens, and guards stood at each door.  The doorway to what I supposed was Jauffre’s own room was on the left, and just one other door waited at the end of the hall.  He waved me past the guards.  They closed the door, a sliding screen, behind me.

These were Martin’s quarters:  nicely sized and appointed, the walls covered with delicate tracery.  He was sitting on the bed opposite the door with his feet up, leaning against the headboard, and still wearing his robes, although they had given him other options.  On seeing me he grinned and rose to his feet.  “Tavi!  How is it that they have finally allowed you to visit me privately on the day I _hadn’t_ yet asked about you?  Do you see how they keep me here?  Do you see that the walls are made of paper?  I have had to remember how to set wards to keep any sense of privacy.  And yet it’s much finer than I’m used to, and that is uncomfortable in its own way.” 

He looked then into my face, and his happy stream of friendly nonsense came to an abrupt halt.  “What’s wrong?”

I told him about my assignment, and he frowned.  “Do you have to – I mean.  Will you be – of course you’ll be all right.”  He cut off the peculiar ramble with a false-looking smile.  “The University will be glad to have you.  I’m sure you’ll do great good in the Imperial City.”

I crossed my arms protectively around my waist.  “I’ll be fine.  I don’t mean to stay there longer than I have to.  I intend to come back.”

He nodded.  “But you’re worried.”

Cursed priests and their empathy.  I was tired of dancing away from this subject.  “Yes.  I’m worried.”  I paced to the left side of the room, drawing my worry from my belt.  I threw the dagger down on Martin’s desk and instantly looked away from it, even taking a step back from it.  As he came to pick it up, I forced the words out.  “I’m worried about the Dark Brotherhood.”

“Is there a contract on you?”

“No.  No, it’s worse.  There…was a man.  We’d been intimate.”  I hated telling him that.  “Briefly.  He was another treasure hunter.  He shadowed me when I was out making an acquisition and wanted to steal the piece from me after I’d found it.”  The rest came out in a tearful jumble.  “He told his men to kill me, and I panicked, and I threw a fireball at his head as he rode away and left me there to die, and it killed him.  And a man from the Brotherhood broke into my room at the inn, and told me it counted as murder, and gave me that, and as much as told me I would be joining them.  And I can’t _lose_ the thing, and I’m afraid he’s still watching me.”

He just stood there silent for a moment, and I could see in his eyes that he was putting the pieces of my confused story together, comparing them to the odd way I knew I’d behaved when we first met.  And then he surged toward the door.

I grabbed him by the arm to stop him.  “What are you doing?”

“Telling Jauffre to send someone else.”

“No.”  I pinched his arm for emphasis, to make him turn again and look at me.  “I’m not going to tell you secrets again if you go straight to Jauffre with them.”

“I don’t have to tell him _why._ ”

“I can’t afford to be seen receiving special favors.  I’m new to the Order.”

At the same moment, both our eyes dropped to where I was still holding onto his arm.  I willed my hand to relinquish its prize, and it parted from him reluctantly, slowly, like the touch of a – never mind, Tavi, _enough._

He exhaled sharply, reluctant to let the matter go.  “The Dark Brotherhood, Tavi!” he whispered.

“Believe me, I know.”  I barked out a humorless laugh.  “But…I want to do this for you, Martin.  I’ve enjoyed hiding at the Temple, but neither of us is going to be safe here forever.  If I can, I’m going to go out and conquer your demon for you.”  I tried to put on a brave smile, but it might have been more of a grimace.  “Perhaps when you’re the Emperor, that will give you the power to conquer mine.”

His jaw clenched and then unclenched, and he nodded.  “Go, then.  Be careful.  You’ve promised to come back.”  He frowned at me for another moment, and then turned his back on me and said nothing else.

That stung a bit, and kept stinging as I rode down toward Bruma.

 


	6. With Your Brace of Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi ingratiates herself to the Mages' Guild and retrieves the Mysterium Xerxes. Martin confesses his sordid past in the hopes that it will make her more careful.

Much of my business around the outlying cities was ultimately trivial.  Jauffre was right about the reputation I’d gained, which was a frequent source of perplexity for me as strangers greeted me as their friend.  That said, few of the Guild Heads seemed to have heard of me, which meant I ended up performing menial chores for most of them to earn their trust.  In Bruma, I had to save poor, stupid Jeanne from one practical joke by being party to another.  The only mage I liked there was the Khajiit J’skar, who I named as the new head of the rebuilt Bruma Guild when I first became Arch-Mage.  It was so gratifying to take a liking to someone and _not_ ever have to find them dead.  I would miss it later.

In cold, labyrinthine Skingrad I was asked to rescue a Bosmer member from his own experiments with necromancy.  I had no sympathy for him.  I did meet a Breton woman with an amusing passion for destructive magic, and persuaded her to teach me some of her favorites.

When I rode down past the sad ghost of Kvatch, I was accosted on the road by an Altmer conjurer who shouted a strange slur at me as his atronach materialized between us.

“You are a traitor to your own kind!”

This when I had only been riding by, mind, as _his_ summoned daedra capered merrily toward me in flames.  But I dispatched them both and moved on, thinking little more of it at the time.

In pretty Anvil I defeated a wizardess who had taken to robbing and killing people like a common criminal.  The local battlemages took the credit, but I still got my letter.  In Leyawiin it was raining all the time I was there, as I did what I must regard as a private favor for Dagail, their grand old seeress.  She looked into my future and pronounced herself perplexed by the mixture of good and evil she saw there. 

Bravil was a miserable wreck of a town, with a drunkard Count whose heir was a useless skooma addict, but the Guild members were nice enough.  Mostly women, one of whom I was asked to rescue from something of a romantic mishap.  And in Cheydinhal, with its lovely Dunmer-style houses, I found another blasted necromancer, this one the head of the local chapter.  He set me a task meant to kill me:  when I survived it, I found that Deetsan, a sweet dear Argonian, had inherited his position.  She had intervened on my behalf while I was gone, and he had fled, leaving behind the evidence of his illicit practice of necromancy.  She wrote the last letter for me herself.

Being out galavanting all over Cyrodiil anyway, I collected most of the remaining Ancestors.  I was gratified to find that those skills had not dulled, and that my improved swordsmanship served me well.

So, papers in hand, I finally rode back into the Imperial City.  First I dropped off my shipment to Umbacano, who had feared me lost (without having brought him all of the Ancestors).  Then I brought my papers to the gated entrance of the University, where Raminus looked them over, declared them proper, and welcomed me as an Apprentice.  I allowed myself the luxury of going inside to investigate, and that was wondrous.  There was a workshop for making enchantments, and a wonderful library, and a dormitory, and practice rooms, and a marvelous herb garden where I was allowed to take as many cuttings as I liked.

Finally, I came back to the business of looking for Baurus.  When I found him he was in the Elven Gardens, and he’d been found out by the man he’d been watching.  We killed him in the basement of the tavern, and on his body we found the first part of the Mythic Dawn’s manifesto.  I leafed through it.  I suppose to someone unversed in real magic it would have seemed profound, but by the Nine, it was self-serving, rambling metaphysical garbage.

Baurus was a handsome young Redguard – according to what Jauffre had told me, one of the youngest men to be accepted into the Blades.  He had still been proving himself when the Emperor died in his care, and the combination of will and weariness set into his face said that he did not yet understand that no other Blade would have fared better in his place.  He did not need me to explain why the book was poorly written:  he needed action.  He suggested that someone at the University might know more about the book.

And I had access to the University.  Wasn’t that handy?

What we had found was the first volume of a four-part commentary on a notorious spellbook.  I got the second from the University’s library and the third from a silly young mer who was on the verge of joining the cult when I frightened the sense back into him.  He told me about the meeting he’d arranged with the cultists, where he would acquire the final volume and gain full entry into the Mythic Dawn.  Baurus suggested we go to the meeting in the boy’s stead.  I was skeptical:  even if the correspondence had all been written, no one was going to look at Baurus and think that a mer name belonged to him.  But he insisted.  And since the meeting was our only obvious window into the cult, I agreed.

The meeting was in a room down in the sewers beneath the city.  I had not missed the sewers, nor their rats.  We found the appointed place, and then I told Baurus that I was going to be the one to meet the agent.  He protested, but I pointed out that I was at least an elf, and he had to agree and retreat into a hiding place upstairs to watch.

  
But it all went wrong.  They grew suspicious and attacked, and we had to kill them all.  At least we had the last volume of the book.  Baurus considered his part of the work done and retreated to Cloud Ruler Temple to be with his new Emperor, while I remained behind to begin the next phase.  Bastard.  As likeable as Baurus was, I have always begrudged him that.

Encoded within the four tedious volumes was the name of a secret marker within the city, which in turn showed the location of the hole in which our red vermin nested, and I sought them out.

They were in a cave not far from Cheydinhal – perhaps so as to be neighbors to so many other of the world’s dens of iniquity.  They did not expect to be found there by the uninitiated:  the doorkeeper approached me with smiles and offers of a robe so that I could join the ritual about to begin, to be led by no less than Mankar Camoran and his children.  First I must kindly surrender all my belongings, as they were now the property of the cult.

I did not kindly surrender anything except fire.

  
But this is another of those stories that is repeated everywhere.  I crept through in shadows; I killed everything I met with two exceptions.  The happy one was a priest they had planned to sacrifice, and the unhappy one was Mankar Camoran himself, the cult’s founder and the holder of all its precious things, all the things of which I had so wanted to deprive him. He vanished away from the ball of flame I’d aimed at his head, taking the Amulet with him. 

But, ah, he had left behind his book.  The _Mysterium Xarxes._

Once I was clear of the place and every wicked creature I’d found there was dead, I thought to have a look at the book.  It was Daedric work of a very abstract sort, and I could make nothing of it except for the feeling of malice that radiated from the letters and symbols.  I snapped it shut and wrapped it in a robe in my pack.  There it could nestle beside the accursed dagger that had again surfaced among my belongings against my will, which I had taken to calling in my head the Blade of Woe.

Evil as the book was, and so inferior a prize to the Amulet, it was still precious to me.  It was a thing worth reporting back about, worth taking home to Martin.  I hurried north.

It was Jauffre I found first, and speaking to him was…disappointing.  He had half expected me to come back with the Amulet, as if it would have been laying about the cave somewhere for me to take, and not hidden away in some dreadful and perhaps unworldly place by the master wizard we now knew we faced.  I told him I at least had the book, and he said that perhaps that was worth something, and told me to take it to Martin as the person most likely to know what to make of it.

Martin was still insisting on his priestly robes.  His face lit up on seeing me, which only reminded me how much I’d missed him, and made me wish it would be proper to kiss him hello.  But then I offered him the book, and he darkened.

“By the Nine!” he snapped, snatching it away from me.  “Such a thing is dangerous even to handle!”  He flung it onto the table behind him as if it were on fire, and turned back to me with a glare that might have been horror or anger.

I must have looked as shocked as I felt, because his expression passed quickly and was replaced with what was more clearly remorse.

“I did have some idea of that,” I whispered.  “I am not completely unschooled in my craft.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.  I just…thank you.  I know you took great risks in getting it.”  He sighed.  “I will study it myself, and perhaps we will learn something of use.”  A pause, and then he went on with his voice lowered, as we were not in private space.  “Were you troubled by anything other than Mythic Dawn agents?”  I shook my head, and he smiled.  “Good.  Perhaps your fame will frighten them off.”

Perhaps, but that was not what was on my mind at this point.  Against my better judgment I voiced my thought.  “The book is dangerous even to handle.  I agree.  And you’re going to try to _read_ it.”

“I have to.  It’s our only lead, and I’m the only conjurer available.”  He smirked at me.  “Former conjurer.  And…and you can’t take all the risks for me, Tavi.”

I looked down at his feet.  Then realized what he had given me, and looked up again.  “So you were a conjurer.”

He sighed again.  “I will tell you the story.  I owe you a secret.  Ask me again when we are alone.”

Because by then we weren’t:  Jauffre had come to see how our briefing had gone.  And to tell me that there were _spies_ in Bruma, and that I must go and find them, as if there were no other competent Blade in the place but me.  At least Bruma was local; I would still be able to sleep at the Temple.

My captain, Steffan, told me that suspicious parties had been seen near the Rune Stone between us and the city at night, and suggested, in envious tones, that I simply attack them.  The Blades were not naturally inclined to stealth.  Instead, I asked for leave to go into Bruma and see what I could find out.  He consented, and Baurus and I passed a pleasant evening drinking at the Tap and Tack, listening to local talk.

The Nords are a bewildering folk:  deadly earnest in their violence, and equally so in their carousing.  And once they’re good and drunk, all that mistrust of strangers melts away, and they will tell anything they know.  What they told me was that there were strange comings and goings from Jearl’s house.

Naturally I went in to investigate.  It was the first time I broke into an actual residence, but locked doors and boxes in ruins had trained me to the task well enough.  In her basement were her copies of the manifesto, and a note, which I took.  And an underground passageway, through which she and her cohort chose that moment to enter and find me there.  I had to kill them both.

The note wished death to Martin, naturally, and also gave a flattering mention of me as an “Imperial agent.”  The Camorans had figured out that we were at Cloud Ruler Temple, and promised Gates to Bruma.

_Gates to Bruma._   My hands were shaking as I tucked the scroll into my shirt to take back with me.  To convince myself it was not out of fear, I told myself it was anger at the tone of hatred and derision toward Martin.  It did not make me feel much better.

But it meant that I took the note to Jauffre, because I did not really want Martin to see it.  Jauffre looked disquieted and made authoritative-sounding but meaningless noises.  Terrible news, watch and wait, at least the spies were gone.  At the moment, though, Martin needed me.

Those words were prettier in my ears than Jauffre meant them to be, of course, and I tried to hide my enthusiasm as I was escorted back to the private quarters.

Martin looked as though he had not slept in the several days I had spent dealing with the spies.  Books were scattered everywhere, and the _Mysterium Xarxes_ sat open on the desk, leaking evil into the room.

“I’m…going to close that, if you don’t mind,” I said, looking down to where he sprawled across the bed with yet another book.

Even his beautiful voice was weary.  “Yes, go ahead.”  He waited for me to do it and turn back toward him.  “I wish I could look happier to see you, Tavi, but I just have to send you away again.”

My heart stopped, and I had to give a little cough to make it start again.  “Why?”

“From what I’ve deciphered so far, Camoran is probably hiding in a pocket realm he’s been able to create within Oblivion.  He calls it his _Paradise_ _._ ”  He scoffed.  “I am trying to unravel the spell that opens the way, but it is rather complicated.  I’ve determined that if we’re to break through against his will, it will take a Daedric artifact.  And that means I have to send you out to find us one.”

I pulled the chair from against the far wall and brought it next to the bed, sat, and nodded.  But he seemed troubled, compelled to explain himself.  “If I can’t go, it has to be you,” he frowned.  “It takes a particular sort of person to attract the attention of a Daedric Lord.  I’m sorry I have to ask it of you.”

I understood that.  Any competent wizard knew about Daedric artifacts – about their great power, and the fact that they were only handed out to the favorites of Daedric Lords.  And a Talos-loving Blade with no discernable talent for magicka was unlikely to join those ranks.  “Of course I’ll go.  Of course it has to be me.  I understand, Martin.”

“Be careful.  Be careful of the Daedric Lords.  I know how alluring their power can seem, especially now, when we are in such need of power.  But even the ones who do not hate us can be dangerous.  None of them are reliable friends, not in the way the gods are.”

“You say that with some authority.”  I tried to smile.  “You had promised me the story.”

“Ah…yes, I had.  And I suppose this is the best time, for any number of reasons.”  He leaned back against the headboard, and turned his gaze the slightest bit away from my eyes.  Defensive.  “I was a conjurer.  I wanted power, the secrets of the universe.  The things an ambitious wizard tends to want.  So I courted the Daedric Lords to gain them.  I began with those who seemed least terrible.  Azura, Meridia.”  A pause, a twitch that might have been a concealed smile.  “Sanguine.”

I blinked at him.  “ _Sanguine?_ ”

His eyes came back to mine, and had somehow turned deep and dark, magnetic.  “Do I seem incapable?”

He did not.  My head was suddenly full of notions of his rich voice purring endearments, his flesh bared.  I was the one who had to look away.  “Go on.”

“Actually I fared quite well with him, and it emboldened me with the others.  That was a terrible mistake.”  His features hardened.  “People died.  My friends.  And I…I only won free myself by the whim of Mephala.”

I gasped, and he looked away.  Hurt, I realized, because he expected judgment.  I touched his hand.  “That far, Martin.”

He smirked and did not face me again.  “Further.  She was saving me from Molag Bal.”  He let that awful detail sink in for a moment before he continued.  “I have never known why.  She laughed at me, said I was lucky Azura was soft and her brothers imbeciles.  And then she freed me from my compacts, because that was in her power.  She said that it would be my death if I ever dabbled in daedric magic again.”  Another pause.  “So I fled for my life and went back to the church of my childhood, and flung myself upon the seminary in an act of penance.  Thus am I a priest.”  He said it staring into the corner, forlorn.

I stroked his fingers, telling myself it was a consoling gesture.  “There is no stain left on you.  You are high in Auri-El’s favor: it shines out of you like moonlight.”

He glanced down at my hand in his, squeezed it, did not look up as he said his last to me.  “Be careful of them, Tavi.”

 


	7. Into My Arms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi visits several Daedric Princes. One offers troubling revelations of Tavi's past. Another is Sanguine, which triggers some much-needed candor between her and Martin. (sex chapter)

I have never excelled at careful.

I was not concerned that no Daedric Lord would help me knowing that I was at war against Mehrunes Dagon:  they are not a united pantheon like the Divines, and there are rivalries and feuds enough between them.  But I had taken Martin’s warning to heart – _the poor darling! What in the world had ever driven him toward Molag Bal?_ – and it only added to the misgivings I’d already had about the Daedric Lords in general.

As he had done, I decided I would have to start with the most harmless, Azura.  Happily she was also the easiest to find, as there were books that gave the site of her outdoor shrine in the east.  The Queen of Twilight spoke to me through her image as if she were a living woman:  her voice was distant, as if she called to me from the opposite end of a long hallway, but it was a real voice.  I never quite got used to that.  She accepted my offering and granted me a quest, which much impressed and slightly perturbed her followers, many of whom had passed years there without her direct notice.  She awarded me with a beautiful gem that could fuel any number of enchantments without being destroyed.

And there it began.  I looked at the lovely thing, and instead of hurrying back to Martin with my prize, I started to contemplate how very useful it would be to me in protecting him.  I decided that I would see if I could find another Lord willing to favor me, and find Martin some other tool, and keep this one for myself.

I sought out Meridia, who loves life and had been a favorite of my people:  she gave me a powerful chameleon ring that, again, seemed too useful to part with.  Infinitely helpful to someone who liked not to be seen.  I went to quiet Nocturnal and gained the key to every lock, precious to me both as a treasure hunter and as a spy for the Emperor.

This is how it was.  This is the way of things with the Daedric Lords.

I never thought to question why every Daedric Lord was willing to speak with me, but I could tell I was losing my focus.  I was not familiar enough with daedric ways to protect my mind – and that was only going to become more important if I meant to keep Dagon at bay.  I went back to the University to deepen my studies, only to find myself enmeshed in the Guild’s troubles with its banished necromancers.  I did what I could to help bring that under control, and then, fearing the lost time, moved on again.

I could not say what brought me to the feet of Mephala, even knowing she had been Martin’s rescuer.  Her reputation is both dire and ambiguous, and she had not been high on my list.  And yet…and yet, there I stood at the base of her statue, looking up at the garland of skulls around her neck, nightshade flowers in my hand.

Echoing laughter rolled out of the stone.  “Welcome home, Methusiele, my little web-spinner!” she rasped.

_Methusiele_ made something itch in the back of my mind.  “Why do you call me this?”

“It’s your name,” said the voice, strangely casual.  “Well, or it was, the last time I sent you.  I lose track of the time.  No, you’re right, it was Methusiele when I sent you to betray the Ayleids to the pogrom.  Now you’re Tintaviel, aren’t you?”

I dropped the flowers and stared up at her slack jawed.  “I….”  There were no words.  “I have always been Tintaviel.”

“Don’t be absurd.  No one is _always_ anything.  But just _now_ you’re Tintaviel, and you’re helping the dragonspawn and Dagon develop their lovely war.  And that’s good.  So I’ll help you again.”  Another harsh laugh.  “I mean, it’s the whole reason I dropped you in that dungeon in the first place, so you could foment this war.  And now that you’re listening to me we shall have wondrous fun together.”

I lost track of her words for a few moments after that.  She kept speaking, but I was lost in the swimming sensation caused by trying to grasp what she’d already told me.  It was nonsense.  But I didn’t remember my life before the Emperor came to my cell.  _Methusiele_ was an Ayleid name…and I had taken so quickly to that lore, those ruins.  And especially to….

“Moranda,” I whispered.

“Of course Moranda!” she snapped.  “But pay attention!”

She wanted me to rekindle a feud between two families by assassinating their respective heads.  For this she would give me a dagger.

That snapped me back to clarity:  it was too like another offer I was still trying to forget.  “I am no assassin.”

“Tsk.  If you say so.  Well, then, you’ll just have to give the boy one of your other trinkets, or go and get one from someone else.  And they don’t all love you like I do, you know.  But you’ll come back home in the end, little mer.  All roads lead to me.”

I left shaken, feeling I understood why Martin had ended his acquaintance with the Daedric Lords after a talk with Mephala.

Moranda.  Betrayal to the pogrom.  _Traitor to your own kind._

Still!  I had to find another Daedric Lord that would not ask something of me more terrible than I could fulfill, and I was running out of options.  I thought of Sanguine, who had been Martin’s favorite.  Drunken, orgiastic Sanguine.  The image again of Martin as he would have been then, eyes alight with desire, his dark locks brushing against his bare shoulders, full lips touching – never mind what they were touching.  I banished the thought with a will.

Sanguine.  At least it might be some fun.

I never learned what exactly Martin had done to earn Sanguine’s favor, but what I was asked for was only an elaborate prank on the Countess of Leyawiin.  It was raining, naturally, when I arrived in freshly-bought finery to crash a party she was holding for some ladies of her court.  When one is the Hero of Kvatch one can show up unexpected to a party.

Have I said that I fancied things above my station?  That night ended it.  They were as dreadful a lot as I would ever encounter, every gesture false, every word a concealed dose of venom, and the Countess herself was the worst of all.  I hoped for something awful as I whispered the spell Sanguine had taught me.

What I _got_ was an excellent view of the naked flesh of many of the finest ladies in Leyawiin, including that of the Countess, who was shaved, and who carried the faint marks of the lash on her back.  They flailed around in dismay, and I was laughing hysterically when I realized that the guards were rushing in and gaining a rather good view of _me_ , as I had not been absolved of the effect.  The shock to their sense of propriety did not give me much of a lead, and I ended up back in prison clothes.

  
Happily, I was less famous in Leyawiin than elsewhere, and the embarrassed court hushed everything up quickly.  So there were no tales of the Naked Hero of Kvatch to contend with.

On the day they released me it rained, naturally, and I went back to the shrine sopping wet.  They had all of my things there waiting for me.

Sanguine laughed at his joke.  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.  I wanted you to loosen up a little.  Here, take the staff.  I know it’s for Martin.  Give him a message for me?  Tell him to stop being an idiot and get on with it.”

I had no idea what that was about.  But indeed it was the thing I planned to give Martin, because I had no intention of ever purposely summoning the daedra, which was the staff’s purpose.

But in all my roving I had also acquired the last Ancestor, and I thought it would be a quick matter to deliver it to Umbacano.  He was very excited to complete the set, and paid me handsomely, which I thought confirmed that our business was finished.  But then he got very urgent about an Ayleid crown that had shown up in the collection of a rival, and he wanted me to buy or steal it from her. 

I went to meet with her, as she also lived in the Imperial City.  I was not inclined to steal the crown from a living and innocent person, nor she to sell it:  and when she talked about the particularly gruesome Ayleid king to whom it had belonged, we both felt a little uneasy about Umbacano’s fascination with it.  She sent me after another similar crown for him from another ruin, Lindai, which she assured me was not very far away.  I obligingly went and fetched it, thinking that would be the end of it. 

When I took Lindai’s crown back to Umbacano, he accepted the substitution readily enough, and then insisted that I escort him at once to Nenelata, the ruin from which the real crown had come.  Not too far, he said, just down near Bravil.  He must conduct this phase of his research personally, with my experienced assistance, and he must do it now.  He was adamant, and an uncharacteristic ferocity was in his eyes.

So I went, being, I suppose, bad at refusals.  He went actually wearing the crown, which I mistook for eccentricity.  I cleared the site for him easily enough, and he asked to be escorted to the throne room.  There he sat, and began to intone half-familiar Ayleid words of magic and rule, and liches poured out toward him from everywhere.

He did not want to study an Ayleid king, he wanted to _be_ one.  By the Nine.

But it was the wrong crown to control them, and the magic turned against him, and he screamed and collapsed.  Leaving me to deal with the liches.  A joyous day.

When I had laid all the undead things back to rest, I returned to the throne to regard the charred remnants of the little old Altmer who had always seemed so amiable, whose spirit would now haunt one of the ruins with which he had been so fascinated.

There, now.  I was standing over the wreckage of a nascent Ayleid rule that I had ruined.  Did it feel familiar?

That was not a productive line of thought.  I finally made my way back to Cloud Ruler Temple.  To my great relief, there were no gates to Oblivion to be seen around Bruma.  I dared to think that it was because I had put that great a dent in their numbers.

Martin was in the main hall, where his study had expanded to the space of several tables, all littered with books.  He was looking back and forth among several of them and making notes when I arrived.

“I used to think that this kind of knowledge was the thing I wanted most in the world,” he said before looking up.  “Had I but known the truth, I could have saved myself years of grief.”  Then he realized who I was, and rose to his feet smiling.  “I’m glad to see you.  Were you successful?”

“Yes.  I have the Rose for you.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.  “Really!”  He looked around the room to where Jauffre, Baurus, and a few other Blades were all watching us.  “I think I would prefer to discuss it in private.”  He touched a hand to my elbow and gently nudged in the direction of the private wing, and I complied, trying to ignore Jauffre’s furrowing brows.

He closed what there was of a door behind us, crossed to his desk, and leaned against it, facing me.  “I thought we would be better off away from Jauffre’s disapproval if we are going to end up talking about Sanguine.  Let me see it.”  I pulled the short staff from my bag, and he cradled it in his hands, staring at it.  “I never thought to see it again.  I won it once myself.”  He placed it gently on the desk behind him and turned toward me again.  “It’s a good choice – a few less daedra summoned into this world at a time when we are trying to keep them out.  I hope you didn’t have to do anything…too distasteful for it?”

“Nothing I’m ashamed to report.  I embarrassed the Countess of Leyawiin.”

He laughed.  But then he looked aside to where I had put down the bag, regarded it for a moment, then raised one palm toward it just a fraction, in what I recognized as an aid to sensing magicka.  He turned back to me with more concern.  “It’s not the only quest you took on for the Daedric Lords.”

“I’m all right.  I didn’t get in over my head, and I’m done with them.”  A pause, a pointed look between us.  “I’m sure.”  He relaxed a little, and I realized I was not quite finished after all.  “Sanguine wanted a message given to you.”

His eyes opened wide at that.  “Oh my.  I’m not sure I should hear it.”  He breathed sharply, closing his eyes as he did so.  “Akatosh guides me.  I am strong in my faith.”  His eyes opened again.  “Tell me.”

“He said to stop being an idiot and get on with it.”

To this Martin said nothing.  He brought his hands down to his sides and took hold of the desk behind him.  He was turning white.

“What?” I cried, alarmed.  “Is it something bad?  What was he talking about?”

“You ask that?”  We regarded each other in mutual bewilderment.  A trace of color came back to his cheeks but he did not quite relax, and his voice dropped to a whisper.  “Heavenly Father, is it that simple?  Do you just not know?  He was talking about _you._ ”

Had I really complained that the Temple was always cold?  I was burning.

“I really thought you knew,” he said.  “I thought it was why you stayed away so long.  I thought you were avoiding me.”

“Oh no.”  I must be crimson by now.  “That wasn’t it at all.”  I swallowed hard, and the rest of the words came out.  “If I were ever to avoid you, that would not be the reason.”

He had fixed his azure gaze on my collarbone.  “Ah.  Then I suppose it may do no harm to tell you that I have wanted you since before we left Kvatch.”  The faintest tremor had come into his voice.

“Really?”  I reflected back on it and realized how stupid I had made myself about how men behaved.  If I had not closed myself off after the disaster with Claude, I would have seen it.

“Yes.  Very much.”  His knuckles were turning white as he tightened his grip on the side of the desk, because – there was no mistaking it now that I knew – he was trying to hold himself back from mischief.  “From the beginning.  The night we shared the tent, you asked me what thoughts kept me awake, and I said _Jauffre_ because I thought it inappropriate to say _I am wondering what you taste like._ ”

I felt unsteady on my feet.

“You have left me a lot of time to wonder since.  In fact,” and now his fingers clenched even tighter, “in fact, if you do not leave me right now, I am going to insist on finding out.”

Without any conscious intent to move I took a step toward him.  His eyes snapped up to mine and locked, and he whispered, “I am not joking, Tavi,” his voice raw with tones I had been daydreaming into it while I’d been gone.

I stepped forward again.  On the next step he caught me by the waist and closed his mouth over mine.  I swooned into him, pulled him toward me by the shoulders.  His lips were full and soft, his kisses insisting but not forcing, drawing out the response he wanted by degrees, coaxing my tongue into meeting his.  A skillful child of Sanguine.

I wanted to rip everything away and rut wildly with him on the floor, and I thought I felt the same intensity reflected back, but he would not be rushed.  He brought up a hand to stroke across my throat, then cupped it behind my head to hold me in the kiss.  The other hand sought out the fastenings to the wizard’s robe I had finally taken to wearing, then began to slowly explore the flesh beneath it.  I’d started to feel the chill of the room again, and that intensified the heat of his palm against my skin.  I fumbled to get his robe open, to get my hands onto his smooth chest.  I felt the smile on his lips as they moved down my jaw toward my ear.  He gave a low, contented hum, and it made me desperate for him.

He kicked his shoes off, and I followed suit.  He took slow steps toward the bed, without breaking the kiss, gently urging me backward.  Without effort his hands slid under the robe at my shoulders and pushed it down and away from me, and I dropped my arms for a moment to be free of it.  Both his hands swept upward again, over the hips and around to my breasts.  He suffered me to open his robe and take it from him, but returned quickly to his caresses as I opened the pants he wore under the robe.  He stepped free of them as I pushed them down, and as soon as they were gone, he pushed me down onto the bed by the shoulders.

That put me at eye level with his shaft, and without thinking I took it into my mouth, stroking its length eagerly with my tongue.  He breathed in through his teeth and twined the fingers of one hand into my hair, clutching me to him, encouraging the rhythm in which I began to suck and release as I took him back further into my throat.  Suddenly he pulled me away from him and gazed down at me.  His eyes were no longer a priest’s eyes.  He bent down and kissed me with a vehemence he had not allowed himself before, threw me onto my back by the hair, and joined me on the bed.

He was lean, faintly muscular in the way of a man who was fit but not obsessed with his shape.  His hair fell down into his face as he bowed to kiss me again, and one warm hand traced slowly down along the length of my body.  His mouth began to follow.  As he kissed his way down my neck he lifted one of my breasts toward him, gently hefted it a couple of times as if pleased by its weight.  His lips reached the nipple and enfolded it, and then sucked with slowly growing intensity.  I rolled my head back and gasped, but he brought his free hand up to cover my mouth, and paused to grace me with a playful grin.

“Not too loud, now.  Remember the walls.  Wards can only do so much.”  With that he returned to his work, and I bit my lip against making any noise.

He began to kiss my stomach, reaching down to push my legs further apart.  He’d regained the composure he had nearly lost, and now he loitered unbearably against reaching the spot we both knew was his goal.  He kissed down the inside of one thigh and then up the other, and then down again only to stop just shy of the mark and nibble, just slightly.  I writhed in protest with one fist clenched against my mouth and the other clutching the pillow behind me.

That pleased him.  At last he touched the tip of his tongue delicately against the pearl where my lips met, slow and maddeningly gentle, as if more would have crushed it.  I rolled my hips toward him, less violently than I felt inclined to because he had pinned my legs in place with his arms.  Finally, _finally_ he brought his mouth down to kiss and lick properly, and again began the gradual build with which he seemed to delight in torturing me.

I fought but could not keep myself from whimpering as the waves of sensation swept through me.  He ignored the first two incidents, but on the third a hand strayed upward from my thigh, glowing faintly blue, and the sound died in my throat.  Silenced.

And then he was merciless.  His fingers entered me, and as they moved he sucked at last with all the ardor I had wanted, only I could not tell him so because my voice was gone.  I had to content myself with pounding my fists against the mattress, throwing pillows, and writhing uncontrollably.  Everything began to dissolve into one trembling pulse, one great bolt of energy –

I felt my voice come back as I was screaming, and horrified back into awareness, I gulped it back into my throat.  The sound that escaped was a high, strangled squeak.

He laughed.  “I should have cast a longer version, I suppose.”

By way of wiping the juices from his face he lavished more kisses on my thighs and my stomach as he positioned himself to take me.  I felt his hardened flesh press against mine and then into it.  His eyes rolled back a little and closed, and with a happy sigh that melted my heart he began to move.  I brought my arms under his to pull him upward, encourage him to come deeper.  I rocked my hips in time with him.

Even now he was slow and measured – although it was becoming a struggle for him, I could tell by how his muscles tensed and worked against him. His breath was becoming jagged.  He wanted to go so much harder than he would allow himself, wanted to ravish me, wanted to be for that moment the man who had trafficked in flesh with Daedric Lords.

I touched his face, and he turned it to kiss my palm fiercely.  Two hard thrusts, and then he slowed again, measuring his breaths, eyes alight.  The restraint itself was becoming part of the build for him, and I decided to let it be.

He took the lobe of my ear gently between his teeth, let it go again, licked it instead.  “Tavi,” he whispered.

That was more divine than anything, hearing his voice while he was inside me.  “Say something else.”

He chuckled a little.  “What do you want me to say?”

“Anything,” I pleaded, caressing his back.

“You’re beautiful.”  He grazed across my neck.  “I love you.”  Then his pace quickened, and he would say nothing else.  He filled me and held me and soon even the loss of his voice was nothing, because we were joined together, and there was nothing to be said that his body could not tell me.

There is a thing that sometimes happens to people in a deep passion – not always even a sexual one – where for a moment all the wounds and shadows of Mundus fall away from them and only the shining soul is visible.  That was what I saw in Martin.  His face relaxed and his eyes took on a seer’s haze.  He was beauty, and then he was light, and then we trembled together and were still.

We lay there tangled together for some time before my head cleared enough to realize that I ought to leave.  Auri-El only knew how long I had been there, and what the Blades who had seen us leave together were thinking.

Martin seemed nearly asleep, a thing I had learned was rare enough.  I tried to get up without waking him, but failed.  He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back down to the bed at once.  “Where are you going?”

As silly as it sounds, I blushed.  “I have a cot.”

“You have a bed.  I meant for you to stay, unless you will not.”

“Did you?”  _Did you mean it?  Those things you said?_

He seemed to read my thought, and frowned a little, offended.  “You took it for pillow talk.  Should I not have meant it?  Do you not love me back?”

Oh, by the very gods.  I’d gone to Oblivion and back for him before I’d even _known_ him.  I had no romantic hyperbole big enough to apply that wasn’t already real.  “I love you back.”

He smiled and it was sunshine.  “Then stay.”  He pulled me back into his embrace and sighed peacefully into my hair.  I relaxed into his arms, glad almost beyond bearing that he had insisted.

And yet I couldn’t leave well enough alone.  “Only Jauffre will be very unhappy, I think.”

His eyes sparkled, and for the first time I saw in him, among his many other facets, a man who knew he would soon rule the world.  “I don’t answer to Jauffre.  Jauffre answers to me.”

 


	8. Going to Hell Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything is sweet until they open up a gate outside Bruma.

By morning I’d thought up all sorts of problems.  The first one was “I’ve violated a priest.”

“Really,” he said, quite casual.  “I thought I’d violated you.  And I’m not actually a priest anymore, am I?  I think it’s time to come to terms with that.”  And he kissed my hands, and that was delightful, and distracted me from woe and strife for a while. 

No one arrived with business for Martin, and we took the opportunity to laze together for a decent portion of the morning.

“Everyone’s going to know,” I said after an hour or so.

That one made him laugh.  “What of it?  Are you ashamed to be seen with me?  Or do you think it’s going to make someone forget everything you’ve done to save their lives?”

And he had a point.  But later there was, “Didn’t Mephala tell you it would be your death if you dabbled in daedric magic again?”

He looked thoughtful.  “Yes.”

“Then I want someone else to take over working with the _Mysterium Xarxes._ ”

Now I had his attention:  now I had sucked him back into the gloom with me.  He stroked my hair.  “There is no one else.  You’re our only other mage, and you’ve got to do all our legwork.  And you’re not a conjurer.”

“Then I’ll learn.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.  Let it be, Tavi.  Reading isn’t casting.  When the time comes, I’ll think of something.”

I wanted so much to believe him that I started adding in justifications myself.  “Perhaps she just said it to frighten you.  She is rather alarming.”  I nestled my head against his chest, and he put an arm around me.

“Probably so.”  He rubbed idly at my neck, and as with me the first time, the contact between us was enough to make everything right for a moment.  Then he stopped rubbing and asked, “How do you know she’s alarming?”

I wanted to say _it’s what I’ve heard_ and leave it there, but I couldn’t lie to him that way.  “I didn’t accept her quest.  But I spoke with her.”

“And she said something alarming to you.”

At least I had something to tell that was true, and would make sense, and yet would avoid the thing I did not want to explore, the whole business of _the traitor Methusiele._   “Her quest sounded disturbingly like the offer I got from the Dark Brotherhood.  Down to offering me a dagger.

He started to rub my neck again, which was reassuring.  “That makes sense.  I’ve heard it said that the Dark Brotherhood worships Sithis, and some people think that there is a connection between Sithis and Mephala, or even that they are one and the same.  I wish you hadn’t ended up there.  That could have been very dangerous for you.”

“More dangerous than Oblivion or a pit of crazed Mythic Dawn cultists?”

“For you _personally_ , yes.  She’s one of the Lords who are dangerous to the mind, and to the soul.”

I considered telling him what else she’d said, seeing if he could lend some sort of perspective, or banish it from my thoughts, or…but that would mean opening myself to the risk that he couldn’t.  And that would have crushed me.

So if she was “dangerous to the mind,” I would just have to tell myself it had all been a lie, and go back to studying more conjury at the University so I would be better protected.  That would also improve my chances of wresting the task of doing any daedric spellwork away from Martin, because _that_ must never happen.

My last protest against our happy solitude was “I’m starving to death.”  By then the morning was almost gone.

He clucked his tongue.  “Yes, I suppose it is getting late.”  He kissed me on the forehead and finally consented for us to dress.

When we emerged into the main hall, to not a few turned heads, Martin strode directly to Jauffre, who stared at us as if we were spriggans who had idly wandered into the Temple.

“Jauffre,” Martin said, and did not even bother to lower his voice.  “From now on, when Tavi is at the Temple, she is my personal guard and advisor.  She is to be given no other duties while here, and she will have unrestrained access to my quarters and my person.”

Jauffre had too much dignity to gape, but that was clearly his mood.  “As you say, Martin.”

I cleared my throat uncomfortably.  “Tintaviel.”

Both men turned to look at me.  “Tintaviel,” I said again.  “If you are going to make formal proclamations about me, then you should use the formal version of my name.”

Jauffre inclined his head in agreement.  Martin knew the gesture as an intimacy, and though he had the decency not to throw both arms around me, he drew close and put one around my waist.  “Tintaviel,” he whispered.  “That’s lovely.”

“You should not do this here,” I whispered back, glancing around the room. 

“No?  Why not?  I might have kissed you.  For that matter, I think they would not move to stop me if I threw you down and took you right here on the table.  Would that have been better, do you think?”

It was hard to suppress both the blush and the laugh.  I held it down to a light warmth across the cheeks and a close-mouthed giggle.

“Then be merciful, and grant me an embrace and a whisper.  It’s the best I can do.”

In my head everyone was already calling me the Emperor’s concubine.  Then again, one could be called worse things.

So we went to the mess and sat together, flagrant in our preference for each other’s company, and ate.

The next handful of days was glorious beyond reckoning.  During the day I helped him with his studies, finding references for him in the books I understood; at night I drowned his thoughts of Gates and daedra in my body.  He was a skilled and ardent lover, a man of so much passion once it was unleashed that I wondered how he had ever moved on from Sanguine, even if lured by occult knowledge or power.

“I didn’t quite mean to,” he finally confessed.  “The danger of Sanguine is that he tires of his playthings eventually.  His servants can wake one day and find that they belong to Sheogorath or Molag Bal without remembering just when it changed.”

And perhaps that was why he never told me exactly what had happened: perhaps he had been one of those who crossed the line by accident, without ever seeing it until he was well on the other side.  The nearest he ever came to revealing it, by my guess, was at a time when we were discussing something else altogether, going through spellbooks.  I was browsing one that was centered on illusion, and there was a reference to, as it claimed, a little-known spell that could be learned from certain high daedra, a variation on spells of frenzy that provoked licentiousness in its target, making the caster impossible to resist.

“It exists,” he said, without looking up from the book he was reading.  “I knew it.”

“Did you?”  I smirked.  “Would you show me?”

He glanced up and met my eyes with an intent, disturbed gaze.  “No.  I will never show you.”

But that did not, in itself, explain the allusion he had once made to someone having died.  Even I do not know the tale.

It was the happiest time in my life, and we both began to pretend that we could go on that way.  But the night came that we should have expected, when guards ran to us from the wall shouting that some horror had appeared down toward Bruma.  Martin and I exchanged a pointed look and rose together from our dinner, along with Jauffre, and went out onto the wall ourselves to see.  Everyone else could only guess, but Martin’s hand found mine and squeezed tight, and mine squeezed back, because we had seen its like before, and we knew.

They had opened another Gate.  The sky above it was already filling with a red that was not dusk.

The three of us shouted orders as the Blades scrambled.  A squadron must remain behind with Martin and hold the temple shut.  Another would ride down with me to sweep the land between us and the city, to make sure that there were no cultists left trying to open other Gates. 

Then.  Then, of course, I would have to go back into Oblivion, and see whether I had won through the first time by skill, or by dumb luck.

By the time we had opened the gates to ride out, there was another rider galloping up to meet us, wearing the standard of Bruma.  He was a yellow-haired Nord, who identified himself as Burd, Bruma’s captain, and told us that a Gate had opened.

Did they think us imbeciles, down in Bruma?  Did they think we could not _see_ it blazing there between us?

He had been sent to see if the Hero of Kvatch was staying at the Temple, as it had been rumored.  I came forward and assured him that I was on my way down to the Gate.

He nodded fiercely.  “My men are there.  Take us in with you.”  As I opened my mouth to protest he added, “The threat to Tamriel is growing, and you will be spread thin.  And it is not our way in Bruma to depend on the Empire to save us.  We must learn how to fight them ourselves.  Show us.”

That was the moment when I fell in love with icy, beerstained Bruma and its surly Nords.  I told him to ride down with us.

So it was that Burd went into that Gate with me and three other men, and I taught them.  They saw the spinning turrets and the exploding mines and the spikes.  They heard the voices of the dremora warriors, who sound as if they are already drowning in their own blood.

I learned how invaluable stealth and chameleon-enchanted items had been to me, and spells cast at distance, and how difficult these things were to translate into a frontal assault leading four men with gleaming armor and swords.

Only Burd made it with me to the orb, and felt the world shatter and reform as we grasped it together, hurled back again from fire into ice.

If he was shaken by the experience or by the deaths of his comrades, he refused to show it.  “There,” he growled.  “I have seen it.  I will teach the rest of Bruma’s guard.  We will not be taken as easily as Kvatch.”

My Blades had dispatched the daedra who had come through to this side, so it only remained for us to ride home in the wee hours of the morning.  The sky was lightening into morning gray as we arrived.

Martin met us on the steps:  I would learn that this was only because Jauffre had insisted that it was beneath the Emperor’s dignity to wait in the stable.  All concern for my sense of propriety was gone, and he clutched me to him as if he had feared I would never come back.

“After all,” I rasped for the sake of my pride, “I _have_ done this before, Martin.”

He laughed, but only held me tighter.  “I watched for you all night from the wall,” he whispered.  “I think it may have been the worst night of my life.”

 


	9. I Want You to Be Back Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi is about to go running all over Cyrodiil begging for troops. Martin is not taking it well. (sex chapter)

We slept for a few hours in our clothes, exhausted.  That was all the peace Jauffre gave us:  when we emerged bleary-eyed for food he approached me at once.  “Tintaviel,” he said, because now that he had the option he liked to be formal.  “They will keep trying.  If Bruma loses three out of four men in every attempt, which would be lucky, they will not last long.  They need more help than we can give them alone.”

“I suppose that’s true.”  I could already feel it coming, the excuse to have me away.  “Given that we must always hold something back to protect Martin and the Temple.”

“Exactly.  You must go down into the other provinces and let them know what is transpiring, and tell them to send soldiers to us.”

Martin snarled.  “ _She_ must not, Jauffre.  Anyone might go.  Send Baurus, or Steffan.”

“ _Anyone_ is not equally equipped to manage if another Gate is opened in their path,” Jauffre said calmly.  “For most it would not be a trial that one lone person could survive.”

“That’s true.”  I felt weary and defeated.  “That’s true, Martin.  It needs stealth, and most Blades and soldiers lack it.  One person can’t just storm in with sword drawn and win through.  We only barely managed with five.”

“Then send five,” Martin growled.  “Send a dozen.  You are needed here.”

“A dozen,” Jauffre echoed.  “That will be subtle.”

I wanted to stay.  I did.  But I could not let him prevent me from protecting his life.  “Jauffre is right.  I have to go.”

“That is not for you to decide!” he cried, waving one hand at us angrily.  “I am – ”

“You are _not_ the Emperor,” I said coldly, and he stopped dead and stared at me.  “Not yet.  And without my help, you never will be.”

The knife had gone deep, and his eyes were full of hurt.  There was a long silence before he responded, and then only in a harsh whisper.  _“Do you think I don’t know that?”_

I stared back at him, marveling that I had wounded him on purpose.  That it had been for his own good did nothing to put my heart back together.

“Very well, Tavi.  Very well, Jauffre.”  He cast his eyes away from us.  “Then you will go.  And I will return to my research, I suppose.  You may fetch your things whenever you like.”  He stalked away toward the library without having eaten.

I’d won the argument.  Winning felt surprisingly like stabbing myself several times in the chest.

Jauffre, however, sighed as if a burden had been eased from him.  “Well, thank Talos for that.  And thank you for getting it through to him.  He must learn to be harder, for all our sakes.”

“Yes,” I said, without conviction.

He stepped toward me and put one hand on my shoulder.  “I have not said it, but you are a credit to the Order, Tintaviel.”

It was high praise from him, and despite my low mood I tried to hold onto it as such.  “Thank you.”

He hesitated.  “…And thus it is with due respect that I say this to you.  The people will never accept an Altmer as their Empress.”

I laughed.  “Empress!  I had no such lofty designs.”

“All the same, it will ease my mind if I know that at least one of you understands that.”

It was a thing I would already have known if I had ever thought of such a preposterous thing as wondering whether I could be _Empress._   Much good had been done in smoothing the relationships between the races in the Empire, but human freedom from Ayleid (and thus Altmer) rule was a cornerstone of both political history and religious faith.  We could rise high – I had heard that the High Chancellor was Altmeri – but to allow one of our kind into a position of hereditary _rule_ would have been entirely too much.  There was not even an Altmeri Count anywhere among the provinces, and there was a Dunmer.

Even to discuss it was vaguely offensive, as if it implied that it was the motive behind my devotion.

“Then know that I understand, Jauffre.  I do not aspire.  I serve the man, not the title.”

“Good.   Then go forth, and serve the man.  We will keep him safe here.”

I ate.  I went and spoke with Baurus about nothing in particular.  I practiced a bit with the heavy Blades katanas even though I never used them.  Eventually I realized that, as usual, I was stalling.  And that brought about just the event I had been trying to avoid:  Martin was in the room when I went back to gather my things.  He was sitting hunched over on the bed, the top of his head cradled in his hands.

All the invisible wounds in my chest reopened.  “Martin,” I whispered.  “I am sorry I said it so cruelly.”

He reached out one hand for mine without looking up.  “No.  I was losing my head.”  He sighed.  “I had not considered how hard it would be to send you back out if you were my lover.”

“Do you regret the decision?”

“No.”  He looked up at me, desolate.  “But I wish you could stay.”

That pleased me to know, but also made the reality more painful.  “So do I.”

He smirked.  “You just assumed I was going to call myself the Emperor.  I might have been about to say _I am too much in love with you to let you go,_ or _I am sick at heart when I think you are in danger._ ”

“With Jauffre standing there.”  I ran my fingers through his hair.  “You have really lost all concept of privacy.”

He placed his hands on my hips.  “Did you really think I was going to be able to conceal it?  Do I seem to you like a man who hides his heart?”

I smiled.  “No.  To anyone who knows you, you are alarmingly transparent.  I can’t imagine how you are going to survive in a world of court intrigues.”

“The same way I survive now.  You will protect me.”  He pulled me down to kiss me, and brought a hand up to my face.  This time there was no slow measuring of steps:  his tongue reached for mine as his fingertips moved up and down along my jaw line.  With hands surer now for familiarity, I took his clothes piece by piece and traced his collarbone with my fingers.  He grabbed me by the wrists and pulled me toward him, reaching for the collar of the robe I was wearing, but I stepped back from him and unfastened it myself.  He watched in rapt attention as I let it slip gradually down over me to the floor.

As I came back to him I straddled his legs, and he pulled me into his lap.  I laced my fingers into his hair and threw my head back as he kissed down the length of my throat.  He raised a breast to his lips and caressed the nipple with his tongue.  I squirmed happily against him, and I could feel him hardening beneath me.  Without releasing my breast from his mouth he grabbed me by the haunches and shifted me for a moment to give himself space to come fully erect; then he pulled me forward again, onto him, and slowly guided me back and forth, fingers curled tight into my flesh.  I held him tight in my arms, and between my legs to the extent that I could do so, wrapping myself around him as thoroughly as I could.  The way our bodies rubbed against each other at this angle was delicious, and I fell into tremors.  He responded with a happy growl and fell backward onto the bed, pulling me after him.

But I broke free and reared up over him, riding him slowly, running my hands over his chest and over my own in turns, letting him see me pull at my own nipples for him, smiling and shivering. He traced up the insides of my thighs with his thumbs and watched me, eyes lustful and smitten but also, still, a little bit sad.  I let him take my hands in his and pull me forward again.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and whispered, “I can’t lose you.  Promise me that you will come back safe.”

Oh, I wanted to cry when he was like that.  I gave him a brave smile instead.  “I will always come back to you, Martin.” 

I traced his lower lip with my tongue, and he seized it into his kiss and clutched my backside again to move me, to train me to the depth and speed he wanted now.  His rhythm grew more urgent, faster in the end than my hips would carry me, and I lifted myself to a point where he could make most of the movement himself.  He came still kissing me, still feeding me his sighs and his sweet, simple desire to keep me close to him.

I wish I could have stayed.

 


	10. Leaks from a Thousand Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi gets busy: closing Gates, gathering troops, researching conjuration, not to mention chewing on unpleasant thoughts about her possible daedric origin and having near-brushes with hidden assassins.

I went forth an ambassador.  I was given an Imperial seal to present to the High Chancellor and to each of the Counts, proving that the Blades had accepted Martin as successor.  The Mythic Dawn already knew where we were, so there was little point in hiding from our friends.

There would turn out to be a familiar, consistent rhythm to my encounters with the nobles, starting with Chancellor Ocato.  I would be greeted warmly as the Hero of Kvatch.  I would announce my business and ask for soldiers for Bruma.  Why should anyone care about Bruma?  Because the next Emperor was there.  I would produce the seal.  There would be various sorts of exclamation of surprise, relief, and concern.

And then they would still say no.

Ocato left it at that.  No, couldn’t possibly, needed every hand in the Imperial City.  Good luck and fare thee well.  Could not spare Imperial Legionnaires _to defend the Emperor._   One is asked to suppose that it was for the greater good:  after all, it was nearly as important to defend the Temple of the One, the site of the hoped-for coronation at which the Dragonfires would be relit and all this horror ended.

He did not _say_ it.  He did not leave so clear a path away from the explanations of personal ambition and cowardice.

Disgusted, I left the Imperial City and rode east to Cheydinhal.  There, as I was talking to the Dunmer widower who was Count there, he was given a much more reasonable excuse to refuse me:  guards ran in and cried that some _awful portal_ was opening outside the city walls, spewing daedra, and that the poor Count’s son had taken his friends and stormed into it, and they were gone.

Farwil, his mortified father explained, was a self-absorbed fool who fancied himself a knight.  He had even founded his own Order and had a hall built for them.  But he had no real combat experience, and what he and his followers most excelled at doing was alienating the city’s trained guardsmen.  But ah, what great good fortune, I was the Hero of Kvatch!  If I could save the city, he would find men to spare for Bruma.  If I could save his _son,_ then treasures from the vault of his ancient and venerable family would be mine as well.

I did not have the heart to say that I thought his son was already dead.  That proved to be fortunate, because it happened that I was wrong.  When I untied the knots in my stomach and stepped through the too-familiar red disc that shimmered between great black horns, I found the boy still alive at the bottom of a winding trail of cliffs and caverns.  All but one of his friends were dead, yes, but Farwil was not.  More’s the pity.

He scolded me for my tardiness and then started ordering me about as if I were any common lackey.  But his eyes were clearly terrified and his voice nearly hysterical, and I tried to take that into account, and not knock him to the ground and leave him there.  His remaining companion saw my waning patience, and with many apologetic looks to me, talked his lord down into being something that at least approached reasonable.  Though Farwil did not go down without several more volleys of youthful bravado and cries of “Huzzah.”

After more discussion than I thought we had time or safety for, the Count’s son agreed that I ought to take the lead, and he and his friend could be my rear flank.  Huzzah.

By then, naturally, several dremora had followed all the noise of his chattering to us, and I had my first opportunity to see him fight.  He wasn’t without raw talent, but he was both unhardened and a bit reckless, and it was lucky that he didn’t accidentally fling himself into a pool of magma.

That was interesting in its own way, to watch an untested youth struggle with the fear and fight through it.  I had never given myself credit for how much ease I had gained in the midst of danger, even though it still made me feel a little bit sick.

The way to the tower was not easy, nor the way up through it, and poor Farwil remained so uneven in his mood and his thinking that I became paranoid for his safety.  I kept urging him to wait, stashing him in far corners and running ahead to spot enemies and trigger traps.  He did not always cooperate.  At every slight moment of relative safety, I would bombard him with healing spells.

“Stop that,” he said at last, when we had nearly reached the top.  “I’m fine, and my skin is starting to buzz.”

“Then let it buzz,” I snarled.

The orb was not in my hands nearly soon enough.  But the Count was true to his word:  he called out to his steward right away to send word to the guard to marshal forces for Bruma, and he himself fetched out an old staff that ended in a tangled snarl of thick thorny vines, and hummed with exotic power.  That was the gift he gave me for his son’s life, and any man who goes to Bruma to look at the statue of the “Savior” can see its likeness.

And it was a little bit exciting to know that I had gotten _two_ people through a Gate alive, with no casualties on my watch.  I was getting better at them.

I was on my way to the stables to leave the city when I heard screams and strife behind me.  I turned and saw a mob, all beating fists, work implements, and a few actual weapons against some figure in the center.  I did not understand until I heard the name of _Dagon_ invoked.

When the guards finally convinced the crowd to disperse, a dead man in a red cloak lay in a pool of his own blood in the street, beaten nearly beyond recognition.

I had become a target in my own right.  In hindsight I should have expected it.

Some of the people who had meted out this vigilante justice on my behalf called out hails and thanks to the Hero of Kvatch, which I did not know quite what to do with.  They also spat out curses against the Mythic Dawn, in which I encouraged them more heartily.

And so, that became the rhythm in full of my visits to the cities, minus the rescues of misguided nobility.  The rejection always came from fear of the Gates that arrived immediately before or after me, then became a barter of my service for theirs, and I would make another tortured journey in and out of the jaws of Oblivion.  And then, their Gate closed, the frustrated cultists would seek me out personally, and die either at a blast from me or at the hands of an enraged populace.  Too few of their recruits understood the strategic importance of not wearing red and shrieking in an assassination attempt.

This is not to say that there were no exceptions.  I was in Leyawiin, and, oddly enough, it was raining.  I was exhausted, and having both closed the Gate and repelled an attempt to stab me, I felt myself about finished with the town.  I thought to rest for a night before moving on, and paid for a room at the Three Sisters Inn.  It was expensive, but Martin had insisted on my having traveling money and being kept whenever possible like a proper ambassador.  I thought it lacked subtlety, but then again, it was getting hard to stay anonymous out in populated areas anyway.

I was even more weary than I’d thought, and I slept hard.  Hard enough, apparently, to miss some interesting action, because when I woke up, there was a body in the room with me.

How had I failed to notice this smell of blood, never mind the sounds of people entering my room and having a struggle?  How had I slept through all of that? 

She was a Bosmer girl – not an especially pretty one, from what I could tell through the drying blood on her face.  More blood was cooling in a large, sticky pool beneath her.  The slice through her throat – under her red cloak – was clean and precise.  So it had not really been much of a struggle after all, I thought.

On her back was a bit of paper, pinned there by a dagger, none other than my often abandoned yet never lost Blade of Woe.  Against both my will and my better judgment I pried it loose from her, and took up the note, which was quite short.

_Careful! – LL_

I was alarmed not only that he had been there but also that he had left the body behind for me to deal with:  but no one thought twice about a dead Mythic Dawn agent, or cared who had killed her, so I was able to leave without further incident.

I visited Kvatch with reluctance, knowing that it would still be only a shanty town; but I thought that if nothing else, I could look in on the people Martin had known and give him a report of their slow recovery.  It was the only place in which I did not have to fight for his support.  What was left of Kvatch loved me, and loved Martin, and was eager to send the little they could spare to his defense.  Indeed it _justified_ them in their suffering.

Of course it was also the only city in which there was no presiding noble, and it was the captain of the guard who spoke with me.  Make of that what you will.

After I had finished my tour, I made my way back to the Imperial City, despite a desire to head home to the Temple instead.  I had done what I could for Bruma:  next I must do what I could for Martin.  I returned to the University, determined to train in the secrets of conjuration.  If someone had to risk casting a spell from the _Mysterium Xarxes_ , it ought to be me.  It _had_ to be me.  Mephala’s warning was too dire to ignore.

_Web-spinner.  Methusiele._

How odd that I had never really given thought to what was missing from my memory, that gaping void that stretched out behind waking in an Imperial dungeon.  Why had I so seldom wondered after it?  Who had I been?

_Had_ I been?

Absurd question.  And yet, as I began my research into the metaphysical lore I needed to understand conjuration, I found that there were references to lesser aedra or daedra being sent into mortal form to perform particular tasks for their gods or Daedric Lords.  There were precedents.

_The whole reason I dropped you in that dungeon in the first place._

Wouldn’t I have _known_ if I had been such a creature?

I distracted myself, again, by throwing myself deeper into other aspects of the study.  I gave the effort as much focus as I could, but of course I had this reputation for heroism – for simple _competence_ – and the Guild would insist on setting me on its own errands, under the guise of it being an aspect of my education and advancement.  As a result, I had a meteoric rise through the ranks, and ended up a Warlock almost before I could notice.

From this period of close work with the University, I learned three things.  First, a bureaucracy of wizards is an abomination, an interminable morass of stagnation and useless bickering.

Second, necromancers and vampires are thick on the ground throughout Cyrodiil, prospering despite the expulsion of the former from the Mages Guild and the hunting of the latter by both amateurs and professionals.  And to go back to the first point, when an entire order of wizards is expelled from their Guild, useless bickering escalates into homicidal feuding, and meanwhile, the stagnation ensures that little of real use is done to prevent it.  At a time when the Empire could have used all the talents and knowledge of the Guild in counteracting the threat from Oblivion, most of them were too absorbed in their own squabble – the necromancers choosing this inopportune time to raise up the “King of Worms” who promised them power (and would he defeat Dagon when _he_ came to Tamriel, did they think?), and the Guild to do…dismayingly little.  It was maddening.

Third and most unfortunate of all, I had no talent for conjuration.  None.  I improved my destruction spells immensely, almost without effort:  my little fireballs became huge ones, and even those I abandoned as I crafted spells that made crackling arcs of all the elements woven together.  I could leave an unwarded target unrecognizable without really taxing myself.  I could attack the life-force directly, if I wished, or suck it out through my fingertips by touch.  The skills of conjuration, meanwhile, remained limp and lifeless in my hands and my brain, no matter what I did to encourage them.  Perhaps one simply cannot learn to summon a thing one does not really want to see arrive when called.

Sooner or later I was going to have to give up.

By the time I realized this I had risen enough in station to be reporting directly to the Arch-Mage, and he asked me to go into Bruma to investigate something for him.  The Guild there had fallen mysteriously silent.

This nearly sent me into a panic.  _They have fallen to the Gates.  Martin –_  But I cut off that train of thought quickly.  The whole city could not be destroyed, nor Gates be standing open there.  Word that dark would have spread. 

“Understand,” I said, as respectfully as I could, “that if I go to Bruma it may be a long time before I return, although I will send you word.  The successor is my first concern.”

“I understand,” Traven assured me.  He was a sweet old fellow.

It was strangely refreshing to return to Bruma.  The University is an insular place, very much cut off from the world, even from the Imperial City; and except for one vexing sojourn in Skingrad, all of my errands for the Guild had been to isolate corners of the world – lovely, familiar Ayleid ruins, and hateful cave-dwellings.  (Evil cults appear to adore living and working in caves.  I remain mystified.  Surely there are other routes to the needed privacy.)

Not many people who are not mages feel much need to visit a hall of the Mages Guild, and while there are exceptions, mages on the whole are not a gregarious lot.  I suppose that was why no one in town had discovered the incident before I arrived.

They were all dead.  Books were strewn everywhere, torn or burnt; bottles and alchemical equipment were smashed and shelves overthrown; and the bodies lay mouldering where they had fallen, and undead things were wandering the halls.  Sickened, I put on my chameleon ring and scoured the building.  The patrolling wraiths fell to my new spells with gratifying ease.

Upstairs there was a voice, cruel and taunting.  Searching for someone, which meant they thought there was a survivor.  Stealth was, as ever, my friend, and I listened to the awful woman gloat about this message she had brought from the King of Worms, soon to be echoed throughout every dwelling place of the Guild.

Enough.  I interrupted her vile talk with a bolt of lightning.  Hurt but not killed, she turned on me, calling ghosts and zombies forth to stand between us.  But my studies had, at least, made my destruction spells very potent, and I won past them with little injury and pulled the life out of her.

Then realized the irony of downing a necromancer with such a spell, and was uncomfortable, and resolved not to use that particular spell again except in the worst need.

I took off the ring, reasonably sure I had cleared out everything dangerous, hoping to encourage the survivor to come out.  And I shook with a horrible rage.  Such a pointless sort of violence, such a waste.  This was not the _time._

J’skar dropped his own spell and stepped forward to greet me with his ears pointed straight back in terror.  He was a fine illusionist, but no fighter, and he had been badly outclassed in this fight – along with, clearly, the rest of his Guild, under Jeanne’s lack of leadership.  I felt guilty for thinking ill of her when she was freshly dead, but there it was:  she had barely been capable of managing her Guild even in peace.  Doubtless it had been a factor in choosing Bruma as the target.

J’skar thought me lucky that I had come when only one of them remained, searching for him.  I thought I could have handled more, but did not contradict him.  He was badly shaken.  I sent him back to the Imperial City to report to the Arch-Mage in my place, figuring that as a witness he could give more detailed information anyway.  He went happily.

I had only recently emerged from the remains of the Guild hall when a messenger found me to request that I come and have an audience with the Countess of Bruma.

She was the only one I had not met, and I found when I arrived that she was my favorite.  An Imperial who had gone somewhat “native” in Bruma, she was full of will and fire.  She had sought me out, she said, for three reasons.  First, while she realized that I was very busy with matters of war, she knew that I had begun as a treasure hunter, and wondered if I might ever make the time to find an Akaviri artifact that interested her.  I told her that I could certainly not spare the time with matters as they were, but would tell her if an opportunity arose.  She acquiesced.

Second, there was a lovely house that stood unowned, and it would be wondrous to be able to say that the Hero (she tended to leave off “of Kvatch”) resided in Bruma.  I thought it would be odd to have a house in Bruma, so close to the Temple, when I could and always did stay there.  She pointed out that I could display there the keepsakes from my many travels – surely too many to keep in any dignity in a barracks?  Although I did not see fit to tell her that I slept in the Emperor’s rooms, the truth was that the Emperor’s rooms in the Temple were not that extensive, and I _didn’t_ really have a place for my own things, which were stashed here and there in chests.  I paid her for the house.

Third, a letter had come down from the Temple for me to be given when and if I arrived in Bruma.  She had received it more than a week ago.

It was sealed with the Emperor’s sign.

 

_By Akatosh, where are you?  All the soldiers have arrived, so you are no longer on that errand.  Not dead.  Someone would know that.  Word would have reached me._

_Return to the Temple when you receive this.  There is work yet to be done._

And this was signed _Martin Septim._

_  
_


	11. You've Been Away a While

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Has the combined stress of sequestration in a hidden temple, training for an office he had never expected to have, loneliness for his girlfriend, and prolonged exposure to the Mysterium Xarxes started messing with Martin's head? Maybe a little. (sex chapter)

“Ah, good,” Jauffre smiled as I entered the main hall.  “I’m glad you’re back, Tintaviel.  Martin has deciphered more of the _Mysterium Xarxes_.  There is more that we need, apparently, but he has seen fit to wait until you arrived.”

“All’s been well here and in Bruma?”

“There were two attempts to open Gates, but Burd’s men thwarted one before it was complete and were able to close the other.  We’ve heard that you encountered several on your circuit.  We are all grateful that you persevered.”  He gestured toward the back wing.  “I believe that Martin is in the library.”

As I nodded and went to deposit my things before finding him, Jauffre stopped me, stepping close enough to speak softly and looking just a little bit uncomfortable.  “Now that you are here…will you try to get him to sleep?  He doesn’t sleep when you’re gone.”

Martin was indeed in the library, browsing through several books at once, as usual.  As I hastened toward him he glanced up, his eyes seemed to devour me whole in one moment…and in the next, he looked back down to the books, giving no further acknowledgement of me.

It was not the greeting I had come to expect.  I stopped, puzzled, and stood at the other end of his table.  “I’m here, Martin.”

“Good.”

Nothing more.

There was a vice around my chest that made it difficult to speak.  “I got your letter.”

He did not look up again.  “Which one?”  When I failed to answer, he dragged one finger along the spine of a book, and added, “I sent one to each of the cities.  Which one found you?”

“Bruma.”

“Ah.”  His eyes darted upward, but instantly he cast them back down to the books.  “So you were already on your way?  Or had you only meant to pass through Bruma and then be off again?”

Oh, gods.  I had delayed too long as usual, and this time I had perhaps done real harm.  I fought the sensation that there might be tears forming, pulled myself very straight.  I did not know what to say to make things right, so I cleaved to business.  “The letter said there was work to be done, and Jauffre said it was something to do with the spell.”

He sat silent for a moment, not moving, and sighed.  “Yes.  It will require the blood of a god.  That will not be as easy to get as Daedric artifacts.  The only thing I have been able to think of is that the armor of Talos is supposed to be enshrined in a place called Sancre Tor.  It has fallen into ruin, but I think Jauffre will know how to find it.  If any of his blood is on the armor, that should suffice.”

“I see.”  I gulped.  “When would you like me to go?”

“You need not go tonight, if you need rest.”  But he did not soften, did not look up.

I clenched my teeth and bowed.  “Thank you.”

Then I fled like a heartbroken coward.

After that I could not trust that I would be welcome to keep my things in his room, and as the Countess had pointed out, I was acquiring too many things to keep in a chest in the barracks.  So I rode right back down to Bruma and deposited my belongings there.  Then I actually bought some furnishings so there would be somewhere to put them other than on the floor.  And a bed, in case I might like somewhere other than a cot to cry myself to sleep.

In fact I nearly failed to gather the courage to go back to the Temple that night.  I did not trust myself to be able to reach through his hurt and find tenderness again.  I was not the one with a talent for speaking my heart, or for pretty, soothing words.  If _he_ had given up those things for good, I did not think I would be able to bridge the gap.

I had to try.  I could not bear being so close and not being with him.

Twilight was darkening into night when I got back to the Temple.  Jauffre and the others were decent enough not to remark on my odd comings and goings.  He had retired to his rooms, they said.

He was sitting in the chair near his desk with yet more books.  I closed the screen door behind me and took a deep breath to prepare myself to speak, during which he heard me, stood and turned to face me.

Naturally, what came out of my mouth was defensive and spiteful rather than conciliatory.  And besides that it quavered with the effort of not weeping.  “So, I am punished, Martin.  I repent.”

“That was not punishment.  It was the cool reserve to which Jauffre is trying so hard to train me.”

So he was learning to dissemble, too.  Soon he would be a real Emperor.

But with that the façade began to crack, and the scorn in his eyes softened back into hurt.  His voice when he spoke again was quiet. “For pity’s sake, Tavi, where _were_ you?”

“Did you think to send a letter to the Arcane University?”

“There was one to Ocato.”

“He wouldn’t have passed it along.”

Martin nodded.  “And what kept you there for so long?”  I hadn’t intended to tell him about my efforts with conjuration, so I bowed my head as I tried to think of what to say instead that wouldn’t sound like I hadn’t cared about coming back.  He spared me the effort by seeing through me, as he so often did.  “Ah, I see.  Over my previous objection.  So knowing that I would not approve, you neglected to send me any word at all.  So I would at least know that you were somewhere safe.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you have any _idea_ ,” with rough edges starting to form around his voice, “what it is like to have to sit here, and wait, and not know?  Are you alive?  Dead?  Captured?  Frolicking with a Nord pirate somewhere, for the love of – there, you see?”  He threw up his hands.  “And now _jealousy._   You have now reawakened every internal demon I have.”

At the first I’d started to open my mouth, and then snapped it shut again to prevent the escape of _What is it like?  Do you suppose it’s anything like not knowing whether this time you’re going to come back and find a smoking crater where you left your heart?_   Because that would have been preposterous.  I was not fit for love talk, at all.

But when he reached the _Nord pirate_ it all became vaguely funny.  Jealousy?  Really?  “Jealousy should be the least of your worries.  There is no one else I could want.”

“Is that so.”  His eyes were catching fire.

“Certainly not a Nord pirate.  That is not at all to my taste, you know.”

“No?”  He stepped into me and took me by the shoulders, more roughly than was his habit.  “What is your taste, then?”

There was something so raw in this energy, so desirable.  I lifted my chin, offering myself for the kiss I was hoping would come.  And it did – hard and voracious.  He spun me and put my back against the dresser, pinning me there.  He bit at my lips, took my chin in one hand to turn my head, bit at my throat.  Bit and sucked there so that I cried out.  Marking me.  He undid my robe and threw it down as a nuisance, then managed to do the same with his without ever breaking away.

This was not the way we had been.  I had irked him to the point of – I thought of his comment about _internal demons,_ and of Sanguine, and I understood.  To the point of acting like the man he’d been before he’d learned to control himself.

It was no less intoxicating than his gentler lovemaking.  Perhaps even more so, because it felt as though a veil had been lifted away from between us.

His hands roamed everywhere, no less skilled for their greater insistence.  He ground his body against mine, sucked and bit another mark into my throat on the other side while his fingers found and rubbed between my swollen lips.  I cried out again, and he only smiled and took no further notice.  He didn’t care any more if someone heard me:  perhaps he even wanted me heard.

I tried to put my arms around him, wanting to sink together to the floor, but he denied me.  Instead he turned me again so that I was facing the dresser, grabbed my hands and placed my palms on top of it at either side of my head.  His hands raked down my back, rubbed and grabbed at my haunches.  Then he drew back and slapped the right cheek, hard enough that I shrieked:  then a second time.  His hands came back up quickly to hold me there, forbid me to turn around, as he pressed up close against me.

_“That,_ ” he growled, “was your punishment.”

He licked at my ear as his arms wrapped around me, one hand to a breast and the other downward to rub at me again.  I clung to the dresser and moaned as he circled and hooked with his fingers, and my legs started to shake.  The hand at my breast left it to move behind me and brush my hair away from my left shoulder, clearing the way for his mouth to find me again, kissing and biting.  As his hand returned to its previous work I melted, fell to my knees, and he allowed me that, dropping to his own knees behind me, keeping his grip in both places, not in any other sense relenting.  I leaned back into him, trying to reach my hands back to touch his hair, to encourage his mouth on the back of my neck – as if he needed more encouragement.

He chose to ask me to speak at a moment when I was in danger of howling.  “Are you mine, Tavi?” he whispered.  I made some incoherent noise in the place of an answer and ground my hips against him.  He bit my earlobe and insisted.  “Hmm?  Are you?”

“Yes,” I whimpered.

“Do you want me inside you?”

“Angh.  Yes.”

On the instant he was there, thrust deep, his fingers still working the place where we met.  I pounded my hands against the dresser, wailing, unable to stop or even to care about stopping.  I sank further, hands on the floor, and that only allowed him deeper still.  I kept falling, down onto my elbows, my head on my forearms, and inside my muscles clenched around him.  That captured his attention away, and at last he moved his hands to my hips to hold them where he needed them as he took me in ever faster strokes.  I could hear his breath, his own short hums of pleasure – a gasp of sudden intensified need as he thrust that last handful of times, as hard as he could go, as far as our bones would allow.

He fell over me panting, one hand wearily fondling my breast as he began to relax.  The thin sheet of sweat between us began to cool, and we collapsed together onto the floor.

There we lay for several minutes, too exhausted even to move to the bed.  He lay on his back next to me, one arm beneath me as I curled against him – his eyes closed, taking slow, deep breaths as he idly twirled a lock of my hair between his fingers.

This was going to bother him when he had cooled down for long enough to think coherently.  This was the side of himself he had been so careful to deny ever since he had entered the seminary, so determined never to let me see even when he allowed himself to make love to me.  He was going to feel awful about it if I didn’t make it very clear that I wanted this part of him too.  All of him.

Knowing that, I held myself in check against making some flippant query about how many of the Blades he supposed had heard me, how many uncomfortable looks we were going to receive in the morning.  I fought that impulse in favor of meeting his vulnerability in kind.

I came up onto one elbow and looked into his beautiful eyes.  “I love you.  So much it hurts even to say it.”

He smiled and kissed me, gently.  “Then send word next time,” he whispered.  “Don’t just _vanish._   It broke my heart.”

 


	12. The Beautiful Downgrade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Relationship repaired, Tavi goes back to work for both the Blades and the Mages' Guild. Unfortunately, her luck is about to start taking a turn for the worse.

The second session, in the deep part of the night that first turns toward morning, was more in our usual vein:  still ardent but gentled.  That time, we lay in the darkness for a while and talked before going back to sleep.

“So,” he said.  “How _are_ you at conjuration, now that you went and studied?”

Nice that he could not see the shame in my face.  “Dreadful.  You were right, there isn’t time for me to learn it well enough.”  And then I was compelled to add, “There isn’t enough time in this age of the world for it.”

He chuckled.  “No one masters every school, you know.  You should see me try to make a potion.”

“I didn’t want my weakness to be conjuration.  I wanted to – ”

“You wanted to save me.  I know.”  He found and kissed my forehead.  “I told you, I will think of something.”  We were quiet for a moment before he added, “And I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I know I was hurtful to you.”  He pulled me a little closer.  “And because it’s dawned on me how stupid a thing I was angry about.”

“It wasn’t stupid.  You worried for me.  I could have sent letters.”

“And what if one had been intercepted?  Then it would have been the Mythic Dawn who knew where you were headed next, and not me.  Your skill and your hope lie in staying hidden.” 

“A thing I’m sure Jauffre pointed out to you.”

“Oh, of course.  More than once.  It doesn’t mean I was listening.  But it’s penetrated my skull now.”  He sighed.  “I have to learn to trust your silence to be a good sign and not a bad one.”

I nestled into him drowsily.  “And that I will always want you more than a Nord pirate.”

He laughed.  “Yes.  And that.”

In the light of morning he saw the bright red marks where he had bitten me, and he winced.  I’d expected that, so I kissed him until his face softened again.  Then I told him that love bites were good for repelling pirates, and he growled at me.

No one gave us strange looks when we came out to breakfast, although Jauffre seemed to avoid looking either of us in the eye at all.

But that was no good, since I actually did need to talk to him.  I approached him a couple of hours after mess and told him so.

He finally looked straight at me, with a deliberate blandness in his face.  “If you need me to, Tintaviel, I will say this once.  The Blades have been personal guards to the Emperors for centuries.  What we see and hear, we do not discuss.  Not with outsiders, not amongst ourselves, and not with those we might see or hear.  Rulers cannot be afforded real privacy, but we are trained to compensate them with silence.”

“Ah.  Thank you.”  I cleared my throat uncomfortably.  “But really I needed to ask you about Sancre Tor.”  I explained the need, and as I did so, what little color he had seemed to leech out of him.

Haunted, he said.  Desecrated and lost, a tragedy to the Order but one they had never succeeded in correcting.  In fact the place had been sealed up and the key passed down through the Grandmasters ever since.  He saw the need and would give me the key, but he worried for me.

“Tsk.  It was one thing when you regarded me this way and I was a stranger, Jauffre.  Surely by now I’m proven.” 

He accepted my reproach with a wan smile.  “You are proven.  If anyone can do it, you can.  Good luck to you, Sister.”

 

Its name in elven had meant “Golden Hill,” but it was not golden.

“Haunted,” he had said, and I had envisioned some handful of ghosts or wraiths, such as I might have found in any old and unquiet place I had explored.  But when he had said “haunted” he had evidently meant “drowning in a sea of uneasy spirits,” because there seemed to be no end to them.  I was still smarting from wounds I hadn’t paused to heal when I encountered the first of the great skeletons.  The first shock from my staff – for already I had started to fear for my stamina – did not fell him, and he was able to cut into me with his heavy blade.  I gasped, and barely had enough time to run magicka into the wound to close it before I had to use the staff to block the next cut.  I drew my own sword and stood and fought, never my preference, and whenever he left me space for a breath, I filled it with little blasts.

One of these had just found his head and knocked him back, and I was raising my sword when he dropped to one knee, raised a hand, and shouted, “Hold!”

Hold?  _Hold??_

The bones fell and scattered, but there was a rippling vapor in the space that had held them together.  In the second it took for me to reflect that I had never seen this reaction before, the ripple ended, and the spirit took shape before me, still kneeling.  “Hold, Sister,” it whispered.

It wore a Blade’s armor.

I lowered my sword, panting.  “Then why did you fight me?” I snarled.

He’d had no choice.  He was one of four Blades ensorcelled by some Under King to keep hold of the place.  I would, he said apologetically, have to defeat the other three the way I’d defeated him, before they could come together to lift the enchantment that would bar my access to the armor.  And they had no control over the other ghosts and wraiths that still blocked my way.

Rapture.  I took the opportunity to cast some restoration spells on myself.  I cast many that day, enough to improve my skill at them permanently:  the building was enormous and full of horrid things. 

Still I won my way out with the sacred armor, and the Blades and Jauffre received me back happily, and Martin grinned and kissed me _out in front of everyone_ and proclaimed how relentlessly grand I was.

Compared to the last time I’d come home, he was in remarkably high spirits.

“I knew you would be all right,” he said, flippant, as though this was something he’d always known and it would be ridiculous of me to suggest otherwise.  “And I’ve made more progress, and the task I must set you next is one to which I know how well you’re suited.”  He smiled as I raised my eyebrows at him and added, “It will involve an Ayleid ruin.”

I beamed.  “Oh my!  Ayleid ruins.  They’re quite dangerous.”

“That’s what I hear.  I was hoping to hire an experienced treasure hunter, but I suppose I’ll have to send you instead.”

In spite of our standing in the middle of the main hall, I was too amused to feel shy, so I snuggled close to him and laid a hand on his chest, purring.  “And what treasure am I finding for you, my Emperor?”

His smile was growing amorous, and it took him a second to remember that he needed to answer the question.  “A Great Welkynd stone.”

I traced his collarbone with one fingertip.  “That may be a challenge.  They were the first things plundered after the Ayleids fell.  I’ve never encountered one.”

“Have you ever been inside Miscarcand?”  I shook my head.  “From what I’ve read, there may still be one there.  But it may be guarded by a lich-king.”

“He would not be my first.”  I gave him a teasing kiss on the cheek.  “Where is Miscarcand?”

“Down past Skingrad.”

“Uch!  I _hate_ Skingrad.  There’s some mad little Bosmer who always follows me around, and Hassildor is insufferable.  I wonder if he got the letter you sent when I was there, and just didn’t see fit to tell me.”

“Then you won’t be tempted to dawdle.”  He kissed my cheek in turn, then stayed close to whisper in my ear.  “How long will you be here?”

“It would be pointless to leave this late in the day.”

He nestled his face into my hair and brought a hand up to my waist.  “Good.  Then we should probably retire before I forget your modesty.”

“As if you had ever remembered it.”

He offered to walk with my hand on his, a gentleman leading a lady.  I laughed and set my fingers gently on top of his.  That was how enamored I was.

 

Miscarcand was familiar and comfortable.  Granted, I was aided along by timing, since there was some territorial clash between the lich-king’s attendant skeletons and a tribe of goblins when I arrived.  I was able to sneak past most of the carnage and focus on picking off the occasional straggler.  Otherwise, the ruin held no surprises for me other than the loveliness of the stone for which I had been sent.

When I came back to Skingrad I was greeted with an urgent message to come and receive a sealed letter at the castle.  At first I assumed this to be Skingrad’s copy of my letter from Martin, and tried to explain that I had received the message elsewhere – but I was incorrect.  This, the fellow said, had the seal of the Arch-Mage.

Count Hassildor – who, for all that he is a strong and dignified leader, is still truly insufferable – gave it to me himself, saying that given current affairs in the Guild, he had been loath to hand it over to anyone else.  Traven lacked Martin’s succinctness.  He hoped that his letter found me well, had heard of the great works I was doing for the Crown and was sure I was very busy with them, and would not have thought to trouble me with his unpleasant business, but sadly he had no one else he trusted to turn to, given that his last two remaining Council members had run off in opposite directions from each other, carrying artifacts they had needed to study in order to fend off the threat from the necromancers, and neither had been heard from again, so could I please.

Gah.

I supposed that Martin would still need time to puzzle out the next part of the spell, and that I did not really want the necromancers to run rampant over the Guild while I was busy elsewhere.

I found Caranya first, in a fort west of Chorrol.  She was supposed to be studying a necromantic amulet.  She was _using_ it:  she and her cohorts were sympathizers of Mannimarco, the King of Worms. 

Caranya, of course, was one of my kind.  An arrogant, power-hungry Altmer!  Can you imagine?

She was no one to get into a spell-lobbing match with, so, since she’d been foolish enough to let me in close with the thought that I’d come to join her, I stabbed her instead.  Her companions I could more easily dispatch by my preferred method, at a distance, one by one.

Irlav Jarol was supposed to be down near Leyawiin – not near enough for the rain.  Necromancers were already attacking there, and the firefights as I tried to make my way down into the fort were terrible.  When I came to the floors that were underground, the necromancers started turning up dead without my help, and there were sounds of battle ahead of me.  I supposed that to mean I was going to find Jarol’s people still alive, but when I reached the noise, it was necromancers fighting daedra.

No conjurers.  Only daedra.

The truth became self-evident when I finally found Jarol’s body, still wearing the helm that buzzed loudly with powers of conjuration.  He had not been a good enough conjurer to control it.  I took it and stuffed it unceremoniously into my bag, despising conjuration yet again.

I took the amulet and helm back to Traven at the University, and he was most distressed.  He knew now that the necromancers possessed a black soul gem, the kind needed to trap a human soul, of particularly great power.  So he begged me to go back to Skingrad – where I had started, for the love of the gods – and help to capture it from the necromancers that had been found there, before they used it against us.

There being no vexed word from Martin awaiting me in Skingrad, I went to the nearby ruin – refreshingly not a cave – where Traven had also sent three Battlemages to impede me.  I’d _told_ him I worked best alone, the silly old – well, but here they were.  They told me that the necromancer we were here to stop was none other than the fine Altmer gentleman (an arrogant, power-hungry Altmer! Imagine!) who had tried to kill me for needing a letter of recommendation in Cheydinhal.

The pleasure was all mine.

We intercepted them on their way into their lair, and many of them died, but Falcar himself managed to open the lock and scurry inside.  This was just what I had wanted him to do:  now I could get in myself and hunt him down along with anyone else he had with him.

By now I was a Master Wizard, and few even of my own sort could stand against me for long in an open firefight.  Soon the gem was mine, and again I carried it back to Traven.

I’d always thought of him as a kindly but somewhat broken old man; so much of his carriage seemed marked by indecision and disappointment.  But when I gave him the black soul gem, he told me that in a moment I must take it again and use it to protect me against the King of Worms, whom he implored me to destroy for the safety of the Guild and the Empire.

And then, before I even had time to make surly noises about all the favors I’d already been doing for the Empire and then accept anyway…he shuddered, and gasped in pain, and curled in on himself over the stone.

“Hannibal!” I cried, stooping with my arms out to give assistance that was already too late.  He was dead.  The gem burned bright with his stolen essence.

We had not been close – professionally amiable, nothing more.  Still, I can name that as the point where my losses began.

 


	13. Above is Red, Below is Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi meets Mannimarco, turns against the Countess of Bruma, and closes a Great Gate. Then she shows her house to Martin as they try to ignore the way the chips are starting to fall. (sex chapter)

When I came down from Traven’s tower, Raminus was waiting to meet me, his face ashen.  He already knew.  Traven had left him something of a suicide note, and in it he named me as his successor.

An Altmer Arch-Mage.  How gloriously funny.  Perhaps we’d be able to alienate a whole other faction of wizards and start another feud.  But I’d promised Traven this last help, and the lair where he expected Mannimarco to be lying in wait was up near Bruma.  On my way home, as it were. 

The lair was another blasted cave with a zealot posted at the door who told me he would only surrender the key on pain of death.  I obliged him and let myself in.  The place was crawling with necromancers and their summonings.  Some of them in groups, which was more awkward:  no matter how stealthy one becomes and how many layers of chameleon effect one has in place, once one person or creature has been struck dead by a magnificent-looking arc of raw magicka, everyone else starts looking around for the wizard.  And some are clever enough to know what kind of subtle glimmer they’re looking for.

Still, I thought to sneak up on Mannimarco, once I had won through his followers.  He seemed to oblige me by looking inattentive as he loitered in his private quarters.  This was on something of an island within a larger cavern, and finding that I lacked a good distance and angle to strike from, I slowly crossed one of the bridges for a better shot.  But he was more canny than most enemies I’d faced:  as I set foot on the island where he stood, a bony cage leapt up around us, and he wheeled and hit me unawares with a paralysis spell.

I’d walked into a trap.

He gloated over me, stepping close enough for me to see that, yes, here was another twisted Altmer man, of what looked like a well-kept middle age.  Close enough to feel for my hand and pull the chameleon ring from my finger.  “Traven’s latest plaything!  I admit that his tastes have improved, though I wonder what he offers that would inspire you to take this kind of risk for him.  Such a shriveled old man.”  I was fighting with all my will to rip some part of my body free of stasis, to no real effect:  he saw it in my eyes and laughed.  “Struggle now, if it pleases you.  In a moment you will never think to fight me again.”

He ran a finger along my jaw.  “Yes, they say in all the stories how pretty you are.  I hear the rumors, but I like not to believe what I haven’t seen.”  He opened the front of my robe, then took out a dagger and cut through the fabric of the shirt I was wearing beneath it, against the cold.  He ran the same one finger down to circle it around one bared nipple.  Then leered, locked eyes with me, and with the other hand traced the dagger delicately along the same path.

Surely I could kill him with my eyes alone?  No, sadly not.

“My own little green-eyed Altmer thrall.  You will not believe me, but I have always wanted one.  It will compensate me somewhat for my poor Caranya.  And they say that you are powerful, as well, when not taken by surprise.”  He chuckled.  “I will delight both in torturing you and in setting you against my enemies.  Hmm.  Shall I take one taste now, while you are still your own?”  He placed his mouth on mine.

Inside I was screaming, though not in fear.  _You are just the same.  Just the same as the lords I came to break in the First Era.  You fools have learned nothing!  How many of you must I kill?_

The voice of the memory I had never tried to reclaim, the voice of Methusiele, the traitor to her own kind.  In that moment, I did not blame her, even though I still did not want to take up the burden of being Mephala’s sending.

He stepped back from me.  “Of course paralyzed flesh is never very responsive.  I shall be better able to judge later.  Let us be about this, pretty girl.”  He raised a hand and began to intone the spell meant to make of me a well-preserved zombie, fifteen minutes past freshly dead forever.

I felt the gem I’d lashed to my arm warm and flash, and there was a sputtering of sparks between Mannimarco’s fingers as his spell aborted.

He was looking at his own hand in puzzlement when I realized that the flare of Traven’s stored power had also ended my paralysis.  I think that I was singing as the first bolts flew from my own hands.

I could have killed him three times with the amount of power I forced through him – although the first time, the one that counted, took several attempts, because he was strong, and because he insisted on calling forth dead things against me.  It was just that once I had him down, I carried on for longer than it needed. 

I broke his staff and threw it into the deep waters in the heart of the cave.  I wished I could break it again.  I wished I could kill him again.  Something about the whole exchange had crawled up under my skin and was lodged there.  I closed my robes over my torn shirt, fussing with it a bit to calm myself down.  The cage had crumbled when he fell, and I went out into the open air and set off for my beloved Temple.

I could hear them arguing as I opened the door, out in the main hall, from which everyone else seemed to have fled.  Martin, fiery, and Jauffre, as animated as I had seen him.

Martin turned his head and saw me, and without any pause for greeting, gestured toward me and looked back to Jauffre.  “And here she is.  We must tell her this plan.”

Jauffre was acerbic.  “Yes!  Let’s see what she thinks!”

They both turned to stare at me.

Martin stepped forward.  “I have finished translating the spell.  The last thing we will need is a Great Sigil Stone.”

Like the orbs I had plucked out of Oblivion.  Only “Great.”  I frowned.  “And how do we get that?”

He paused before answering.  “You’re not going to like it.  Jauffre doesn’t like it.”

“No,” Jauffre interrupted, “you’re quite right.”

“We are going to have to let them open a Great Gate in front of Bruma.”  He looked at me pointedly, while I stared at him as if he’d just announced that he was actually made entirely of yarn, and Jauffre made an exasperated _you see? Exactly!_ sort of gesture.

“Oh.”  How quiet and reasonable my voice sounded.  “Like the one you said opened in front of Kvatch?  The one with the siege engine that destroyed most of the city?”

“I know it sounds – ”

“Suicidal?”  The quiet and reason in my voice was fading.

“Then do you believe that I would suggest it if I saw any other way?”

I made a quick, frantic search for other options in my own head and found none.  I crossed my arms.  “No, I don’t.”

“Then it’s decided.”  With that, he turned and started purposefully toward his private chambers.

“Wait!  What are you doing?”

He turned back and looked only at me.  “We must go down and talk to Countess Narina, and then go out into the field.  I am going to put on my armor.”

Jauffre looked sick.  “And there it is, Tintaviel.  Behold his plan.”

I was beside myself.  “You can’t possibly!”

“I can, and I must.  It will draw them out; they will open the Gates faster, which will mean that we may last long enough to _see_ the Great Gate and…and send you into it.”

That was true, but I was not about to say so.  “It will make them suspicious, and it will risk your _life_.  You are the one thing we cannot afford to lose, Martin!”

“No, Tavi.  _No._ ”  He paced back in close to me, and lowered his voice to a furious whisper.  “This I will do.  I will not always stay sitting in this prison while you risk yourself for me.  This once you will let me stand with you.”

I was tearing up in frustration.  “Then can we not at least wait until morning?  You can send advance warning to the Countess that you’re coming.  You can let me have a full night’s sleep before we go out and kill ourselves together.”

I could see him softening.

I was exhausted and angry and afraid for him, and it was starting to take a toll on my composure.  “You haven’t even asked me for the Welkynd stone I brought you.  You haven’t let me cry to you that Traven is dead and I was molested and almost enthralled by an Altmer necromancer on my way home.”

“What?”  There, now he was the one who was horrified, and it was only fair.  He clutched me to him tightly, then just as quickly loosened his embrace just a bit as if afraid that would now be too much physical contact.  “Tavi….”

“I mean, he didn’t get far.  I killed him before he could – ” I suppressed a shudder.  “All the same, Martin, I would like the one night to recover before I have to do something else completely awful.”

“Of course,” he breathed.  “I’m sorry.  Of course we will go in the morning.  Jauffre, please send someone to inform the Countess that we are set for tomorrow.”

“You’d already arranged it?  I wasn’t even _back_ yet!  What were you going to do if you provoked them into opening the Gates and I wasn’t _here?_ ”

“I wasn’t going to _go_ until I spoke with you.  But we have been corresponding, preparing.  Fighting with Jauffre.”

“Ah.”  I leaned my forehead against his shoulder.  “I’m too tired to keep arguing.”

So we retired.  I gave him the stone and the stories, and he rubbed the tension from my neck, and soothed and sympathized with all the talents of a man who was both a lover and a former priest.  The massage spread gradually over my entire body, and I reciprocated, both of us lavishing the most attention on the best of places.

When we finally did sleep, we slept well.

But in all of this I did not dissuade him from his course, and in the morning, after we had eaten, he girded himself with the radiant armor reserved for the Emperor and waited to lead his Blades down into battle. 

“At least,” I said, “promise me you’ll stay back.”

“Tsk.  I can’t.  I have to _lead_ , Tavi.  _You_ stay back.”

“That’s absurd.  At this point I have far more experience.”

“And that is why we need you for the Great Gate.  Let us keep you safe until then.”

“If there is anyone in Tamriel who needs to be kept safe, Martin – ”

“Talos help us,” said Jauffre, coming out in his heavy banded armor.  “ _Both_ of you stay back.  This is why we have soldiers.”

Martin and I exchanged a bemused look, and knew that in fact neither of us was going to stay back.

We had arranged to meet with Narina Carvain in the chapel dedicated to Talos.  It made sense that the temple named for a deified Emperor was the one closest to Cloud Ruler Temple. 

She was a little woman, but attractive and lively.  She thanked me for the service I had done for Bruma in training Burd and bringing reinforcements, and informed me that a statue had been commissioned in my honor.  I gaped and blushed; Martin grinned wide and assured her of how honored I was.  She swore her allegiance to Martin and bravely offered Bruma into his dangerous plan, risking everything they had for the survival of the Empire.  Martin smiled and commended her wisdom and her courage, and they traded a few other pleasant words – he and this young, unmarried noblewoman of grace and poise and politically expedient human stock.

She wasn’t my favorite any more.  I hated her.  I cast my eyes down to the floor to try to hide my sudden scorn.  I was still staring downward when I realized that everyone but Martin and I was leaving, off to gather the guardsmen who had come up from the other cities to join the Blades outside the city walls.

“Tavi?”

I was out of my mind with jealousy.  “Not her,” I hissed through my teeth.  “You can never marry her.”

“I can never – what are you talking about?”

“The Countess of Bruma.  The pretty Imperial woman you were just talking to.”

He let out a shocked noise that was almost a laugh.  “Nord pirates, Tavi.”

“What?”  I looked up at last.

“You are worrying about something that will never be.”

Oh, oh.  So dear, and yet so horrible.  This was not the same thing, and he knew it.  The whole world literally depended on his bloodline being preserved.  Sooner or later his people would demand that he get heirs – and I would not be his wife.  _Couldn’t_ be, as I knew Jauffre would have told him more than once by now.  He would have to marry someone else.  He would have to take another woman to his bed, even if it was true that he loved me best and forever.  And I would have to take it, and not kill her.

He read my feelings, as he always did, and pulled me close by the back of my head, touching his cheek to my cheek.  “Ssh.  I will not marry her.  I never had any intention of marrying her.  We will find a way.  Perhaps all of my children will have to be bastards, like I was.”  I giggled a little, and he laughed with me, and then said, “We have to stay focused, Tavi.  We have to deal with one crisis at a time.”

I nodded, and with a kiss to my forehead he released me.  We walked out of the chapel, and the people of Bruma cheered us.

The first Gate was already opening as we rode out, and the city guard had to clamor to close the city gate behind us for the sake of the town.  Martin shouted quick words of encouragement to the gathered Blades and guardsmen – a thing at which he had much improved since his overwhelmed speech on first reaching the Temple – and had hardly finished when the first wave of dremora warriors was upon us.

Perhaps you will want me to say how glorious he was in battle, how he shone forth with the might and skill befitting an Emperor of his stature, how he radiated with the Nine’s blessings and cut a path of blood through his unholy enemies.  I am sure he did, but I saw little of it.  When one is actually in battle one is very much focused on one’s own fortunes, and even that is a sharp, disjointed thing, and only comes apart more when viewed from a greater distance in time.  I remember throwing a magical shield over him when it began:  it was a spell I had crafted myself during my time at the University, simultaneously protective and healing.  Other than that, I was fighting for my own life, trying to stay near enough to him to cast it again whenever I could, and watching the Gates.

It took three to raise the power to summon the Great Gate.  By the time the third had opened, the ground was swarming with all Dagon’s creatures, and was crumbled and black beneath us, its layer of snow long since trampled away and then scorched by fire and magicka and darkened with blood.  Clannfear screams, and dremora growls, and the shrieking of destructive spells in flight, and the clashing of metal, and the cries of men and mer.

The Gate I wanted – _wanted_ is a terrible word to have to use for it – towered even over the others, and at the very first glimmering I could see the black monstrosity that waited behind it, the siege engine.

I was not going to have much time. 

I slipped through the red shimmer in the air, heard the sucking sound of breaking through the barrier between the worlds, and set foot in Oblivion one last time.

Everything seems different when you know that time is short.  Once my beloved Ring of Khajiit was on my finger, I did not stop to make sure I was being quiet, or that the opponents I struck out against were dead before I moved on.  I did not watch as closely for the signs of traps, and two different ones broke through the lapse in my attention and wounded me.  I restored myself just enough to keep moving.  I had to be quick:  I had to be faster than the Gate:  I had to beat the siege engine back to Martin.

My carelessness attracted more notice than I would have if I had taken my usual pace:  more than once the sharper dremora would notice the illusory ripple I trailed as I ran, or foes I left only wounded would sound alarm.  But magicka was thick in the air around me, and I used it to force my way through the greater resistance.  Still, if the dangers of Oblivion had not become so familiar to me before that day, I would probably have died there and doomed both Martin and the world.

Perhaps it is best not to dwell on it.

Taking the Great Sigil Stone from its place wrenched the worlds back apart with such force that for a moment I thought I would fly to pieces myself.  There was an instant when I seemed to be nowhere at all, where there remained nothing at all that was real –

 -where Mephala smiled and raised one of her four dark hands in benediction, and with another hand pointed downward as if showing my way –

and the first thing to become solid again was the ground beneath me as I fell to meet it on my hands and knees, clutching the heavy stone to my belly as if it were my child.

I heard the groaning of fatigued metal behind me and instinctively rolled forward, and behind me was a horrible crash.  I stood and looked back.  The Gate had closed with only a portion of the siege engine having gotten through, and had closed with such force that the great machine had been severed.  A cheer went up among the men, and they dispatched the daedra stragglers – for comparatively few remained, so many having run back to help pull their engine forward – with a fierce joy.

I had already done too much to bother myself with stragglers.  “Martin!” I cried, pulling off the ring.  “Where is Martin?”  I saw a head turn to face me, and as he threw off his helmet I knew him, even though his armor was so brown with blood that it was hard to tell from any other man’s.  As he came I scanned him to be sure that most of the blood was not his: no, he moved well, he was not gravely hurt.  He strode toward me with his eyes burning, and took me into his arms as well as he could with armor and the Sigil Stone between us.

“Thank the gods,” he breathed, echoing my own thought.

“I have it,” I panted, as if the thing were not between his chest and mine, impeding our embrace.  “We are ready.  Where is Jauffre?”

I felt his hands clench into my arms.  I frowned and tried to move forward, to make him take me to the Grandmaster.  But he only resisted me more.  “Don’t.  Don’t look, Tavi.”

And yet I thought nothing of it except for my own contrariness, and wrenched myself free of his protective grasp to step into the battlefield, and see.

Carnage was everywhere, and at my guess, fewer than half of us had survived.  Jauffre was lying next to a dremora Kynmarcher, one of their officers.  Jauffre’s katana was still embedded in the daedra’s throat…and the daedra’s mace, in turn, in what was left of Jauffre’s skull.

I also saw Baurus.  Baurus was…everywhere.

My head was spinning, and I felt myself beginning to make some strangled, hysterical noise when Martin reached me again and pulled me close, which made me only dimly aware that I had dropped the stone.

The noise was breaking apart into laughter.  High, hysterical laughter.  “Steffan will be Grandmaster now.  He’ll be so _happy._ ”  The laugh threatened to go back to shrieking, and thence to howling for vengeance against things already dead, and I could feel how wide my eyes were with shock.  He stood, and held on, and said nothing until I was quiet again.  I do not know how long that was.

He turned my head by the chin and looked into my eyes, deep and probing, and I knew he was looking to see if my reason had returned.  I started to bring my breath back to an even pace, and nodded.  “I’m here, Martin.”

His voice was very quiet.  “Let them clear the field.  Don’t turn back around until I say it’s all right.”

“You needn’t worry.”  I looked down to where the stone lay beside us.  “I’m lucky I didn’t break my own foot.”  I was trying not to think about Jauffre or Baurus or who else among the people I knew might be lying broken behind me, but the effort turned my attention elsewhere.  “You’re so calm.”

“It’s not that.”  I looked up, and there was weariness and sorrow set into his face that I had been too irrational to notice before.  “I don’t have time.  I am already thinking about the next crisis.  I think that it will only be when everything is over that I look back and grieve properly.”  Then his mood shifted.  “We needn’t stay here.  I can make us a path that…avoids most of the scenery, and we can go back up to the Temple.  At any rate I will have to start preparing for – ”

“No.  Not straight back up to the Temple.  I can’t.  I need – I need to – ”  I fought back another wave of emotion and grabbed his hands.  “I have a house in Bruma.  Let me show it to you.”  _Let me be with you in a place that is not your cell, a place that will not be full of the ghosts of those we have just lost.  I am not strong enough to be there yet._  

He squeezed my hands with a sad smile.  “Very well, Tavi.  Show me your house.”

A man had to go in and search it before I could take the next Emperor inside, and guards stood posted around the outside, so it was not quite my own idea of normalcy; but it sufficed, and for Martin it had to be the very soul of liberation.  I set a fire, drew water and warmed it for us, then helped him remove his stained armor.  Beneath it he was wearing pants and a tunic, neither royal nor priestly, just simple, practical clothes for under armor.  Just like any normal man.

I smiled.  “I have never seen you look so ordinary.”

He laughed.  “I’m going to assume you meant that in the most flattering way.”

“I did.”  I wetted a cloth and began to wipe the blood and the dirt from him, and he closed his eyes and breathed deep, relaxing for me.  I took his shirt and washed his back and his chest, adoring every contour as I went, kissing favorites.  He took my robe – quite ruined, and I was never to wear it again – and washed me with another cloth.

We were as yet too exhausted for more than that, so I took him to look for fresh clothes.  I managed to find a pair of pants shapeless and featureless enough not to look too peculiar on him, and as he put those on, I rummaged through the other bits of clothing I had somehow collected over time.

He put his hand to a green dress I had thrown onto the dresser.  “You know, I think that I have never seen you wear a dress.  I would like to.”  So I put it on, and his eyes danced with apparent delight.  “You were right to suggest coming here,” he said, holding out a hand to invite me to come to him.  “I have wanted for weeks to have a moment outside the Temple.  And I think that I have wanted all my life to see you in that gown.”

I snuggled against him, as happy as I could be given the day.  “It’s almost like we’re real people, isn’t it?”

“Mmm.  Now, ordinary woman, does it happen that you have any food on hand to entertain your ordinary guest?”

I pulled back and frowned.  I was hungry too.  “No, it doesn’t.  Just a moment.”  I pulled a few coins from a box, went to the front door and placed an order with the guard stationed there to bring us dinner from Olav’s.  That was one advantage of always having people underfoot, anyway.

He laughed and sat down in my living room.  “Do you entertain a lot of strange men here, ordinary Tavi?”

He certainly seemed to be enjoying this joke.  Maybe he needed it as much as I did.  I smirked at him.  “Of course not.  That would hardly be proper.”

“Forgive me.  Remind me what it is that you do for a living.”

“I am an alchemist.  And you?”

“I’m a priest of Akatosh.”

I placed my hands on my hips.  “That does me very little good, you know.  Now I’ll be afraid to kiss you.”

“Why?  I’ve _told_ you we’re not a celibate Order.  We’re allowed to have sex with our wives.”

“Now you’re teasing me,” I pouted.

“No, I’m not.”  He pulled me to kneel before him, and touched his forehead to mine.  “Tonight we are normal people, remember?  So there is no reason we can’t.  Tonight, pretend that you are my wife.”  A plaintiveness emerged in his voice.  “Do it to please me.” He kissed me with a degree of need I had somehow failed to expect. 

Such a horrible day.  And I would have married him in truth if I could have, or done anything else I thought might make him happy.  “Ssh.  Of course I’m your wife.”  He kissed me deeper, but before we could consummate our impromptu marriage the knock came at the door:  our food.

So I fed him, and showed him all the baubles I had collected in my travels:  glowing blue Welkynd and white Varla stones from Ayleid ruins, the Count of Cheydinhal’s staff, a bowl full of gems I’d found in various places, my full set of the Mythic Dawn’s idiot books, and everything else.  He smiled and nodded and let me tell him about each of them.  As I put away one of my Ayleid crowns he followed me and hugged me from behind next to the dresser, kissing the back of my neck.

“It’s late,” he said.  “We should try to sleep.” 

“You’re right.”  Removing my dress actually took some effort, as neither of us was that familiar with its structure, and we laughed as it finally fell away.  His pants were easier.  We got into bed – _my_ bed, in _my_ house, just like any normal couple if we pretended there weren’t guards posted outside.  He nudged me to lie with my back to him, and he curled up behind me the way he had that first night on the way to the Temple, only now we were skin to skin and he pressed closer than he had dared then.

“I love you,” he whispered.  “Whatever happens now – ”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“We’re nowhere near out of danger, Tavi.  Let me say this.  Whatever happens, know how much I love you.  I will never stop.”

I whimpered.  It always broke my heart when he was tender.  I craned my neck to the side to kiss him, and he came up onto his elbow to make it easier for me.  As we kissed he brought his top hand up to my breast and fondled it.  The warmth of his body sank into me, and I tried to press myself against him from head to toe, to soak him in.  I caressed his feet with my feet, and he wrapped his arm further around me, enfolding us so completely that it began to feel as if we were melting together into one flesh.

Which was divine, except that it began to bother me that I couldn’t hold him as well.  I twisted back toward him from the waist to get an arm around his neck.  That forced him down a little, and he moved from kissing me to raising my breast to his lips.  Once his mouth got a firm grasp of the nipple, his hand wandered down across my belly, and after lingering there for a moment, to my thigh.  Then he pressed my hip forward and brought his top leg between mine.  I felt him pull his other leg up beneath him for support.  I twisted further, leg forward and shoulder back, and now we could embrace almost as if we were facing.  His face came back more flush with mine.

“You _are_ my wife,” he muttered, as if I had argued the point.  “Whether anyone else knows it or not.”

I reached my tongue up to touch his lips, to persuade him to kiss me.  He did, and at the same time he entered me, deep but slow and gentle.  In this position I could not easily move my own hips in counterpoint to his, so I could only sigh and lick his lips and tangle my fingers in his hair.  With every stroke I could feel myself dissolving into how much I adored him.

There were not the words for it.  I would have shot down one of the moons for him; I would have faced down Mephala and Mehrunes Dagon together.  I would have done anything.

All I could actually do in that moment was to whisper his name.  He whispered mine back, and for just a second everything in all of creation was perfect, and his bliss and mine rushed to meet inside me and sweep through all of my senses, and then crash and leave us lying already half-asleep.  He dropped back to where he had started behind me, nestled close with his arm around my waist, and we drifted off that way, floating in momentary peace.

It is now my most bitter memory, that sweetness.  A part of me wants to reach back through time and throttle him for it, because it wonders if he already _knew._

 


	14. Severance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moment every Oblivion fan knows only too well is upon us.

Morning brought him a sense of haste, and he pulled me from the bed with noises about things to be done “while we both still had the courage.”  I pulled on another of the assorted robes I’d enchanted with shields when bored at the University.  We took a quick meal of what was left from the night before and rode back up to the Temple.

When we arrived, he banished all foot traffic from the main hall and began to bring out the items I had collected for him, leaving me to set the Great Sigil Stone in the place he instructed.

He did not pause from hurrying around the room placing the artifacts as he spoke.  “The ritual itself is surprisingly straightforward, so once everything is set it should not take long.  But once you are through, we may not have much time.  I am making yet another rend in the veil between us and Oblivion, and I do not know how much more it will bear.  Are you ready?”

So he was going to do the ritual himself.  He hadn’t come up with any other answer.  Of course I hadn’t either, and I realized with some hopelessness that there was no point in stopping to argue about it now.  He could not relight the Dragonfires without the Amulet, and could not retrieve the Amulet without risking his life on this spell.  We were trapped.

He stopped and looked at me, and smiled a little, seeming grateful that I was not going to fight him.  “Why do you suppose I began as a conjurer, Tavi?  So that I would know my enemy, and so that I would have the knowledge and the power to send you through.  The gods will not let it be for nothing.  I will be here when you come back.”  He touched my cheek.  “She did not say I would be struck dead _instantly,_ you know.”

“I know,” I said, although I knew no such thing.  I had no power to change his mind once it was set, so nothing remained but to do what he asked of me.  “I’m ready.”

He nodded.  “I believe that you will have to kill Mankar Camoran to get back.  I cannot hold the way open for you once you’re through.”  He watched for my assent, sighed, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he began to concentrate.  I felt the energy of the room shift as he dropped his consciousness into the spell and began to make arcane gestures with his hands.  The inhuman words of command flowed with a seductive ease past his throat and tongue – strangely beautiful, I thought:  had I been a daedra I would have answered such a summons – and I could _feel_ , before I saw, the tear forming in the space between us.  It widened and filled with a pale light, and I stepped through.

Hear and understand this, Tamriel, if nothing else:  “Paradise” was a flower-choked prison.  Lovely, yes:  filled with the golden light of morning, flush with trees and grasses and rare blossoms.  And also with atronachs and dremora keeping a watchful eye over the misguided souls who had become their slaves.  There were men and mer wandering the garden who had died in service to the Mythic Dawn (I even met the Bosmer girl I had found dead in my room at Leyawiin), all wandering dazed and cowering before their captors.  A few had not yet abandoned their illusions, but most were beginning to understand that the riches and power Camoran had promised them were lies.

And this, you must know, was the pleasant side of Paradise.  Her other face still awaited.  I had to fight my way through the atronachs and the daedra, although few of the poor fool cultists resisted me.  What spurred me forward in especial fury was that Mankar Camoran’s voice greeted me, echoing from nowhere and everywhere.

“So at last the Champion of Cyrodiil comes to challenge me!  It is only fitting that you have come, my dear, the last fading strength of the old era sacrificed in midwifing the birth of the new.  Come to me, and before you meet your honorable fate I will tell you the real import of the moment you have been sent to witness.”

It was as bad as his writing.  Perhaps he had written his speech ahead of time:  it did not sound like a spontaneous utterance.  I trembled from hating him so completely.  I was going to kill him horribly – and then, if Martin was not waiting safely upon my return, I was going to hunt Mankar’s soul down in whatever pit of the damned it was thrown into and _eat_ it.

He had told me to come to him, but he did not make the way obvious.  I scoured a good portion of his island fiefdom before I stumbled onto the cave entrance I needed, and here there was a sentry posted.

The daedra raised his hand to me and approached me.  “No mortal passes through the channel to the Forbidden Grotto except by my leave,” he said in his awful gargling voice.  But he raised his hand again as I obligingly reached for my sword.  “I am Kathutet,” he said.  “I have heard of you…Tintaviel.  You have slain many of my kind and gained great renown.  For a mortal you are competent.”

I had never seen a dremora hesitate or make peaceful talk.  I stood and listened, not sure what else to do with it.

“You cannot pass through without the Bands of the Chosen upon you,” he went on.  “You may fight me for them, and it will gain me honor to kill you.  But it will also gain me honor to make you bow to me.  I have a task.  Obey and I will give you the Bands.”

I smiled.  He really ought not to have given me the choice if he meant to take that tone with me. 

When he was dead, I took the Bands and approached the door, but it would not open to me.  Ah, I had to have them on me.  I clicked them into place, and as the way slowly opened, I saw the familiar red glow that marked most of Oblivion.

Camoran was still talking, now about the ancient majesty of the Daedric Lords and their superiority to the gods who had “merely” created the world and were thus confined by it.  Ugh.

Inside were molten streams with metal cages hanging over them, some containing charred remains – which made no sense to me.  These were the dead:  how could they be killed again?

“Champion!” a hooded figure hissed to me from ahead.  “Come, and I will explain everything.”  With a shock spell dancing on my fingertips, I stepped forward.  The speaker was an Altmer boy – of course an Altmer boy! – who regarded me with a peculiar mixture of hope and dread.

“Kill me and I will only return to life,” he warned.  “Such is the infernal curse of this place.”

Then he explained that he had been one of those responsible for opening the Gate at Kvatch, and that he had died there, puzzled at how hard the people fought to defend their corrupt lives against the coming purification.  (It was good that he had warned me against killing him, although I played with the thought of trying it once to make sure.)  When he had failed to show proper appreciation for his slavery above ground he had been transferred to the job of torturing these even unluckier souls, with the warning that failing an improvement of attitude he might join them.   Camoran’s powers had granted them a daedric flesh such as was needed to dwell permanently in such a realm:  and so, like daedra, they could be tortured or killed and then renewed at their point of origin endlessly.

Daedric spirits are built to endure that kind of mental strain:  men and mer are not.

“We did not understand,” he whined.

“That was very foolish of you.  The mighty never give their power away for nothing.  They use it as a lure to attract more to themselves.”

“Let me help you reach him,” he whispered.  “You will need me.  I can remove the Bands.  You will never be able to leave here wearing them.”

I allowed him to lead me through – and still Camoran kept talking.  Now he was saying that in truth the gods had not even created the world at all, that it was itself a Daedric realm that had been stolen and that Mehrunes Dagon was poised to _liberate_ and reclaim in the name of the Daedric Lords.  (As if they were all of one mind!  I knew better than _that._ )

He never showed any awareness of where I was or what I was doing, so perhaps his ability to sense me was limited to knowing my presence or absence.  Or he did not yet care.  Or perhaps he was just too enamored of his own words to pay attention.

The fool boy – Eldamil was his name – was true to his offer and took me through the first half of the dungeons more or less without incident.  I only had to kill the dremora he answered to, and that only because I did not trust Eldamil quite enough to cooperate with his plan to have me pretend to be an imprisoned cultist.  After that I had to fight the other daedra in our way, but that was not a grave concern for me.  Almost all are vulnerable to shock, at which I excelled.

And still, Camoran!  Did he believe half of what came out of his own mouth?  Did he never stop _talking?_

At last Eldamil removed the Bands from my wrists, pointed the way that led out to the mountain villa where Camoran resided, and asked my leave to come with me and continue to assist.  I assented:  he had been useful so far, and if I got him killed I would not have to feel very sorry for him.  If he died and it took, I would even be doing him a favor.

Outside we re-emerged into false loveliness, and our trail led up to a hall in the Ayleid style.  I actually clucked my tongue at Fate’s grand redundancy.

We were met by the Camoran children.  I thought I recognized their faces, and that I remembered killing both of them, but of course, Mankar would have been able to clothe them in new daedric flesh just like all his other followers. They offered to lead us in to see their father.  I had only seen Mankar once, from a distance and in poor light, but the faces of his children affirmed to me that he would be, indeed, yet another Altmer – and this one long-winded.  I began to wish I had taken Mephala’s dagger so I could use it to cut out his tongue.

“Keep them busy,” I whispered to Eldamil, “and I will focus on Mankar.”  He nodded.

The architect of all our troubles sat enthroned and wearing his robes, his staff ready by his side.  He could not wear the Amulet, but he held it in his left hand, as if to taunt me with it.

Fool.  Now he could not hold a weapon.

He was actually opening his mouth to speak again when my first arc of lightning struck him.

There were immediately sounds of struggle behind me, Eldamil keeping his promise by fighting the others.  Freed from that concern for the moment, I drew my sword and ran forward to meet my nemesis, shock still dancing through my hand, down the blade, and into him.

He was fast, and strong in his shields, and it was a struggle to pin him down for long enough to hurt him.  But in the end, I could hurt him with much more ease than he could hurt me.  He was a brilliant conjurer, and that was his undoing.  A conjurer is defenseless without his servants, and I had already torn my way through them all to find him.  I was a destroyer, and when the raw elements danced between us, they danced for me.

He fell, and I dropped to my knees roaring with joy to take the Amulet and the staff.  But with his death, the little world maintained by his power began to collapse in on itself.  The walls cracked and crumbled around me, and the ground itself gave way, and Mankar’s body and I were falling through blackness…

He, into the Oblivion he had courted and championed.  I, into Cloud Ruler Temple, still roaring, with my prizes in my hands.

And there Martin stood, eyes wide, face slowly registering his pleasure and relief.  Still alive himself, and not instantly struck dead, just as he had promised.

I felt myself on fire.  I could not speak, but held the Amulet up in my right hand.  I paced toward him with it raised, and he inclined his head and let me drop it around his neck.  It sparked to life on his chest, brilliant red.  He put an arm around me to embrace me and I reciprocated, but it was almost an absent gesture: we were both in too fey a mood to give it our usual attention.

“I’d read,” he said softly, “that the souls of all the Emperors were ensconced in this gem, back to Saint Alessia.”  He was staring down at it, stroking it with one fingertip.

I scowled.  “So after you serve the Empire, your reward will be imprisonment in a glorified soul gem.  It isn’t fair.”

“That’s not quite what it really is,” he said.  “Now that I have it, I know.  It is like…a conduit between our world and Aetherius.  That is where they are, and they reach us, reach each new Emperor, through the Amulet.”  He paused.  “I can hear them speaking to me.”

I was fascinated.  “What do they say?”

He looked up at me as if he had never seen me before.  Then he took my head in his hands and kissed my forehead, ever so softly.  “They say we must hurry,” he whispered at last.  “My shining Altmer lady.  Follow me this step further.”

Of course.  I would follow him anywhere.

While I had been gone he had sent a messenger ahead to Ocato to be ready for his arrival, assuming my success.  The presence of the High Chancellor was necessary to make the coronation legal:  but all unneeded pomp and circumstance was to be put aside.  We rode down with a small contingent of the remaining Blades, through the night and into morning without rest.  Although the leader of the Mythic Dawn was dead, Martin feared that Camoran’s followers would not all give up their plan – might not all even know what had happened for some time yet –  and that the damage already done might be worsening by the moment.

We arrived in the city and were met with noise and bother from the crowd, and the Blades had to push them out of our way.  We moved as quickly as this would allow into the Palace District and to the chambers where Ocato should be waiting.

I had already developed an ambivalence toward Ocato, and that combined with our hurry did not incline me to be subtle or gentle as I strode in ahead of the others.  “Martin Septim approaches!” I shouted.

Ocato was alone at the great round table in the center of the room; he rose and lifted his chin in self-satisfied greeting.  “Martin Septim, you say!” he intoned, as if I had not come before bearing the Emperor’s seal and informing him of the needs of Uriel’s heir.  Perhaps some part of him had not quite believed it.

But Martin entered with Blades flanking him:  and he was wearing the Amulet, which glimmered on him, and he had the purple robe appropriate to this occasion flung over his shoulders, and the gleam of purpose in his eyes; and any doubts Ocato might have been entertaining fled.  He bowed and stammered and welcomed Martin to his city and his palace.  They exchanged the required formal words of acknowledgment, Ocato bowing and scraping the while, Martin doing all he could within the gravity of the moment to move things along.

They had finally come around to making noises about proceeding to the Temple of the One when we began to hear the screams outside.  The pair of Blades waiting at the door behind us barred it shut and ran to us, forbidding us that exit with the word we had least wanted to hear.  _Daedra._

Martin’s gaze turned fierce.  “The quickest way to the Temple!” he cried, looking at Ocato.  The Chancellor silently turned, gestured us to follow, and ran.  Behind us, I heard the doors give way, and turned to see dremora entering to pursue us.  I paused to help the Blades against them, and had to run hard to catch up with Martin and Ocato.

Outside the palace, the sky was dark, bloody red and beginning to thicken with smoke from fires we could dimly see over the walls.  It was more than should have happened so quickly with one Gate, more than we had seen even at Bruma.  But no Gate was visible to us in the Palace District, and our only thought was to reach the door to the Temple District.

That had been the primary target, it was obvious as soon as we arrived.  Multiple Gates poured color and smoke into the air, and daedra over the ground.  Our Blades marched forward sternly to their doom, and Ocato, bless him, began to pound down our enemies with flurries of hail.  He was another destruction mage, though a lesser one than myself.  There was no time for any thought of closing these Gates:  we would have to settle for beating back the daedra for long enough to reach the Temple of the One before –

Only there was no longer such a thing as “before.”  What there was instead emerged from behind the once-beautiful white dome of the Temple, nearly as tall as it was, ten men high, four-armed like Mephala, and as red as the rest of his realm.

Mehrunes Dagon, in Tamriel.

I did not remember grasping Martin by the arm, but I was holding it when he spoke, as we both stared up at the Daedric Lord.  “The veil is down,” he said.  “It doesn’t matter now if the Dragonfires are lit.  He is already _here._ ”

“We have to do something!  The Amulet!  What do the Emperors tell you?”

He paused for only a heartbeat, and then his face hardened.  “I understand.  I know what I was born to do.”  He glanced sideways at me, putting his hand for just a second over mine, then removing it to the hilt of his sword.  “Clear me a path, Tintaviel.”

He did not have to ask me twice.  I leapt forward, weaving the elements into the space before me, twisting them into long ropes of power that lashed out to each side of us as we ran.  I did not concern myself with what, or even who, lived or died as we passed by, and I trusted Ocato and our dwindling supply of warriors to give us cover from behind.  I only blasted and ran…and ran toward Dagon.

His blazing eyes turned down toward us as we neared the doorway to the Temple, and he raised one foot as if to crush us beneath it.  Martin cried out to me and ran toward the door.

I stood; and what I thought as I stood did not seem like my own voice.  _You implied our consent but did not gain our permission.  We decide in favor of the compact:  we decide in favor of the Dragon._   And then I released a shock full of all the magicka I had left, straight up into the sole of his foot.

I saw the sparks dance up through his leg, further than I would have imagined I could send them, and he stood still and shook his head, perhaps dazed.  Martin had gotten inside, and I ran to join him.  He had approached the altar in the center, but saw me, and ran back to grab me by the arm and run with me to the opposite side of the round room, away from the door.

He looked into my eyes, solemn and sad in defiance of the panicked nature of the moment.  “I cannot stay to rebuild Tamriel.  I cannot – ” he choked on a pain I could not yet understand.  “Remember everything I said, Tavi.  It will still be true.”  He kissed me quickly on the mouth, stifling any question I might have thought to raise.  And then he said, “I must go.  The Dragon waits.”

I stood there as he ran back to the altar, too confused by the speech to know what I needed to do.  I could already hear the walls around the door cracking; they began to collapse, and I saw Dagon’s hands tearing them down.  I screamed for Martin – and that was when I saw him bring up his sword and smash the pommel into the Amulet in his other hand.  A light exploded out from it that threw him upward, encased and then filled him as I continued to scream –

And then he was gone.  Gone for one painful heartbeat, and in the next, the avatar of Auri-El appeared, the vast and golden dragon, and blasted Dagon with its terrible light.  The Daedric Lord replied with his own fire, dull and dark by comparison.  They wrestled, the dragon biting and shaking at Dagon’s throat as he pounded it with all four hands.  Auri-El broke free first, and fired light again at the Daedric Lord, and again, and with one more great blast, the image of Dagon reeled back, crumbled into smoke, and was gone.

I stood there, the lone mortal witness, as the avatar bowed its head, gasping, as if its strength had been tested.  Still also Martin.  Still also my love.

Its head craned upward again, and it screamed.  I could feel the power radiating forth all around us, the veil between us and the Daedric realms being renewed.  The dragon screamed its triumph.  Did I only imagine that Martin was still there within it?  Did I imagine that in the scream I also heard his grief?

All at once the light faded, cracked and broke, from the chest outward:  the dragon went horribly still as the scream became a shattering noise, and when all light and sound was gone, a great statue remained, still contorted in the same living throes of Auri-El.

I stood there, unmoving.  There was nothing else I could do but stand, staring up at the terrible frozen thing, wondering if the gods would actually have been so cruel as to entomb my lover’s soul in that stone forever.  No:  I would have felt him there.  Then I wondered, for one crazed moment, if perhaps I had misunderstood what I had seen, and Martin was nearby somewhere, alive.

No.

Perhaps I was dead too.  I did not feel my breath or my heartbeat.  Perhaps at any moment now, Auri-El’s light would realize it had left my spirit behind and come back for me.

I became dimly aware that Ocato had arrived and was talking, and with that came the awareness, once and for all, that Martin was dead and I was alive.  The worst of all possible outcomes – worse, for me, than the whole world falling, because then we would have been dead together.

The first words I actually understood from Ocato’s mouth were “Where is Martin?”  I wrenched my gaze down toward him, and my eyes must have been answer enough, because he stepped back from me with a look of horror and said, “Oh.  I am so sorry.  He was truly a great man.”

“You do not know,” I rasped.  “You will never comprehend how great he was.”

Ocato bowed his head for a moment in respectful silence, then began to report to me – softly, carefully – how they had seen from outside that it was a great golden dragon, an avatar of Akatosh, that had come to save them, and how the Gates had vanished with Dagon and the skies were already beginning to clear.  The daedra were gone and the fires were being extinguished.  The City had been spared.

All wonderful, of course.  It ought to be wonderful.  The Empire would survive.  The world of mortals would survive.  It ought to matter to me.  It had mattered to me once:  it had mattered to Martin.  Mattered enough for him to leave me here without him.

Ocato marveled at the statue, surely a sign left behind of our salvation, the new token from the gods, to replace the Amulet.  I nodded as if I agreed, as if I cared, and thought about all the time I had stolen from us, the sum of all of my little delays.  Would that time have made the difference?  Would that time have kept the veil together until we had lit the Dragonfires?

No.  I must not pursue this line of thought.  I could not have known, and this might well have always been Martin’s fate.  A death foreordained by the words of Mephala.

But if I was Mephala’s creature, the difference between her fault and mine became irrelevant, didn’t it?

Ocato tried again to retrieve my attention.  He declared me the Champion of Cyrodiil, and promised that he would have made a suit of Imperial Armor made for me, the armor only worn by the Emperors themselves.  The Council would have to discuss what to do about actually choosing the next Emperor.

These things he said with a peculiar, pained look on his face, and I understood him.  We were Altmer, he and I.  He would never be able to place me on the throne – as Jauffre had said, the people would not be able to accept an Altmeri Empress, no matter what she had done for them.  But he would make his silent statement by granting me the armor as a symbol.

It was a touching gesture, but one my cynical nature tainted as it does everything.  I suspected that in fact, many years would pass before an Emperor was chosen; and those would be years in which Ocato was the de facto ruler of Cyrodiil – as near to real rule as one of us could come, for as long as he could manage it.  We were Altmer, he and I.

I accepted the offer with what little grace I could muster and staggered away from that place with my eyes downcast.  Now that I had wrested my focus away from the stone dragon I must never set eyes upon it again.

 


	15. Step Lightly Over Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi has a lot of trouble finding her place in a Martinless world. But there is still an offer on the table.

I met no resistance as I sleepwalked into Talos Plaza and through to the bridge to Weye.  Those not still hiding in their homes were fussing about the last fires or asking each other, dazed, if they had really seen the dragon.  The sky continued to clear, and had come around to a perversely lovely blue as I went out onto the bridge and climbed up onto its rail, looking down into the deep waters.

I remembered the water-breathing ring the fisherman had given me, and took it from my finger (I wore it by habit) and set it down on the ledge beside me.  It would have rendered this a pointless exercise, and perhaps up here someone else would find and make use of it.

I stood again and pondered the rippling blue far beneath me, the promise of the dark silence I wanted.  But that gave me pause, and I stood there, frozen.  I had seen too many spirits and too much of the Daedric realm to cherish any illusions that I could simply slip away into nothingness.  I might very well continue to be – and I would still be without Martin, who had ascended into the highest halls of Aetherius alongside Talos and the rest of his holy lineage.  The soul of an Altmeri grave robber would never ascend half so high…and the daedric soul of Mephala’s creature would land somewhere even more distant.  He had gone to a place where I could never follow.

I could not end, and I could not join him.  I screamed with all my breath.  I screamed at the horrible injustice of it, at the Daedric Lords, at the gods, at Martin.  My tortured sounds echoed back up at me from the Rumare.

When I could no longer muster another scream I stepped down, took back my ring, and began to walk, not knowing to where.

I wandered aimlessly for some number of days, purposeless and adrift.  I took to wearing the Ring of Khajiit all the time, because every joyful welcome and flattering remark on my heroics was salt in my wounds.  I did not feel like a hero:  if anything, perversely, I was coming to feel like the least of my fellows, the one who had failed to manage an honorable death alongside everyone else.  I was becoming a ghost.

It was by no conscious design that I found myself outside the inn beneath Azura’s dusk, and thought to stop for the night.  It seemed a small, quiet place, unlikely to be filled with well-wishers trying to disturb me.  I read the sign.

The Inn of Ill Omen.

I remembered the name, and frowned.  Someone I had been, back before I had withered, had meant never to come here.  But she was sad and quiet and passive now, and I walked in the door.

The place would have fit well in Bravil; it was a ramshackle wooden hovel, a glorified shack.  The owner, Nord I thought, stood at his bar and rubbed at it mindlessly with a towel, pretending that this made some difference to the appearance of the place.

He did not respond to me, and it took a moment for me to realize why and remove my ring.  Then he startled, and smiled, and welcomed me in a bit too friendly a voice.  I paid him for a room.  “There are not many other people staying, then?” I asked.

“No, not most nights.  I think the name intimidates people.  I suppose I should change it, but then, I’d have to change the sign.  It’ll probably just be you and Rufio tonight.”

“Rufio,” I echoed, trying not to sound like the name had any familiarity or interest.

“He’s been in the downstairs room for months.  Sleeps most of the time, I guess.  Anyway, his money’s good.”

“Sleeps most of the time?  Is he sick?”  How ironic if all along, the Dark Brotherhood had intended to send me out on a mission of mercy.

“No, I don’t think so.  But he never brings women down – men either – doesn’t have any wine or books down there, so I don’t rightly know what else he _would_ do.  But like I said, his money’s good, and it’s not my place to pry.”  With that, he looked at me a little more closely, and his face started to light up.  “Say now!  Aren’t you the – ”

“As you said,” I interrupted, trying not to snap, “it is not your place to pry.  I would like to pass a quiet night.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

I had a beer before I went upstairs to my room, but it did little to soothe me.  Rufio was still here, after all this time.  I found myself wondering about him.  What kind of man was interesting enough to be assassinated but uninteresting enough to sleep months away in a bottom-class roadside inn?

I told myself, as I slipped on the Ring of Khajiit, that I was only going down to look because I’d had so little else to occupy my mind except for my own misery.  I told myself that I was bringing a weapon with me in case the man was dangerous.

Did I still have – yes, of course I did.  The Blade of Woe was there in my bag, as always.  I brought it to hand, cradled it and felt its weight there.  There was something strangely comforting to its feel in my hand:  one familiar thing that had not abandoned me. 

I quietly slipped down into the entry and then through the little door leading to the basement.  There was a cellar for supplies and on the right, divided away only by shelves, a room with a poor bed on which Rufio, I presumed, lay sleeping.

He was an unassuming little man asleep.  Late in his middle age, or else prematurely aging from an unwholesome life.  Balding.  He reeked of…of smallness.  I wondered again what such a _small_ spirit could have done to provoke someone to invoke the Dark Brotherhood against him.

I stood there and watched him sleep for several minutes.  At last he stirred, gradually realizing that someone was present in the room with him.  “Ungh.  Hello?  Who’s there?” he mumbled.  I stood and said nothing.  Untrained eyes would not find me in the dark, not with my ring on.

He lit his lamp, turned and saw the shimmer.  And then – he did not reach for a weapon, did not call a spell into his fingertips, did not even make a break for the door or call for help.  He leapt up, scurried into the back corner, and begged for mercy.

He was _cowering._   I had never seen such a thing.  Even sewer rats did not _cower_.  The sight evoked more anger than pity in me.  I was so outraged that I actually removed my ring as I stepped toward him.  “Stand and face me.  Don’t be pathetic.”

“I didn’t do anything!” he whined.

“Didn’t you?”  It was an honest question, although it sounded accusatory.  I didn’t know.

He crouched and cowered, and I watched his sniveling with growing disgust.  He began to whimper.

“Please!  I…I didn’t mean to kill her!  I only wanted her to be still…but she fought me, and she kept crying….”

The world turned a different color before me, and I felt ice flow through my veins.  _For you Martin gave up his life to the dragon?  I am torn from my love forever, for you?_ I was almost panting for air.  _Every good man I ever knew is dead and I am left the last of us, for_ you? _For a little coward who is only even a murderer because he failed as a rapist?_

_No.  Not for you.  You are not worthy._

I could have turned and gone, recollected my senses.  I could have screamed.  I could have lain down on the floor next to the pathetic creature and died.

I cut.  The first stream of crimson bloomed across his throat.  I cut again in the same place, pressing until I felt the windpipe crack, so there would be no crying out to summon aid.  I brought the little Blade of Woe down to his sickly belly, and there I cut again.  Again.  Again.

I do not know how long it took before I calmed down enough to be aware of myself.  I looked down.  I was kneeling next to…if Rufio had surviving family, they would never be able to recognize and claim the body:  there was little left of him but scraps and fluids.  Absently I wiped the blade on my robes – pointless, as there was just as much blood on me as on the knife.

There.  The deed was done.  Now there was only the wait.  Procedure to be followed, before my damnation was official.

I got back on my feet and staggered toward the door and up the steps, slipping on the chameleon ring as I went, so as not to be seen going about soaked in blood.  I cannot thank anything but luck for the fact that I did not drip a trail of gore behind me.  I was not careful.

I returned to my room, supposing that would look less suspicious than vanishing when I had already paid for the night.  And I was tired, and if he was going to find me, perhaps it would be easier and faster if I was still at the scene.

I was right:  as I closed the door and took off the ring, I was greeted by a low chuckle, honeyed frost.  “Finally, Tintaviel!  You do like to keep your men waiting.”

And so it was that I joined the Dark Brotherhood, and allowed cool, patient Lucien to catch me at last.  But their stories are not yours for the asking.

I have come to collect the armor that Tintaviel earned when she was still a girl smitten with a god-man and they were the darlings of a desperate Cyrodiil.  I will take it up to her house in Bruma with the rest of her lovely keepsakes from those times, and seal them up as the tomb she deserves, in the place where her statue stands in tribute.

But Tintaviel is dead.  I am Methusiele.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to Twist Shimmy for beta


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